


War of the Worlds

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume IV [2]
Category: 19th Century CE RPF, DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Historical RPF, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, d'Artagnan Romances (Three Musketeers Series) - All Media Types
Genre: 19th Century, Farce, Good versus Evil, Historical Accuracy, M/M, Poetry, Post-Canon, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-17 11:25:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5867458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Napoleon falls and a new world rises from the ashes, our heroes do what they do best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Way We Live Now

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry this took so long! We both had a mad week from hell and neglected our duties to the Arathos and Audience.

**Vienna, May 1815**

_To battle, Achaeans, to battle!_

The archaic battle cry thrummed in Athos’ blood. His heart beat a frantic rhythm in time with the words, and they escaped his lips in a sigh that I swallowed. “Battle, Athos?” I murmured into his mouth and felt it curve in a smile.

“You taste of blood, flittermouse.”

“And it is delicious.”

He had fed me that night, my God of Discord, screwing himself deeply into me and whispering words in an ancient language into my skin. The pulse of his blood throbbed through me, his heartbeat guided mine. We were one flesh.

Through the open window, Euros carried the sound of music into our rented room on soft wings. The statesmen were having one of their many balls. _‘The congress dances, but it does not advance,’_ as the Prince de Ligne had observed. _‘Nothing seeps through but the sweat of those dancing gentlemen.’_

That was about to change. The wheel of fortune had turned, Tyche had spoken and her word had become flesh. It rang in the air, in the sound of a thousand legions marching in formation. Of a thousand swords being drawn. Of a thousand cannons roaring in righteous wrath.

“To battle, Achaeans,” I mouthed against Athos’ temple, leaving dark red smudges on the bluish-pale skin.

His smile deepened and he stretched beneath me, squeezing my arse with both hands, and purred: “Sweet chyortik… so excited by the call of blood.”

“Almost as excited as you,” I pointed out, grinding against his hard cock. “Wearing the armour and mantle of Discord has reinvigorated you, my Hellenic idol. Where is your Buddha now?” I whispered, grazing the skin of his throat with my teeth.

“Where is your Jesus?” he shot back. “Did he not preach mercy and charity?”

“Yes, to the poor and powerless.” I licked a long path all the way down to the hollow of his throat. “It’s easy to preach humility and meekness to those who have nothing. Who don’t know the sweet taste of _power_.” My fangs sprang forth and pierced his skin easily, and liquid life poured into my mouth, spiced with the flavour of virility and power.

The door opened, the curtain around our bed billowed, and Mr Grimley came in like the good servant that he was: without knocking and with a tray.

“Good morning, sirs,” he drawled without moving his lips, put the tray down and strode to the window to pull the curtains. “Judging by the rosy countenance of Miss Eos, it is going to be a beautiful day. And permit me to observe that the reddish tint of the rising sun lends the plague column a certain je ne sais quois.”

I half-rose, baring my teeth at the Olympian nuisance, but Athos clamped a hand over my mouth and pulled me back down.

Mr Grimley turned around and faced us with icy calm. “I’ve made so bold as to procure fresh horses. Master Euros assures me that with their help we will arrive in Flanders in a bit more than a week. That should give Master Aramis enough time to discuss sirs’ military career with the relevant authorities on location.”

“We must come up with new names,” I told Athos, ignoring the Grigori who fussed with the teapot and breakfast tray.

Athos yawned and nodded. “You’re right, flittermouse. It’s time to bury the duke of Alameda for good.”

“And don’t even think of calling yourself Athanasios. Nobody uses that name anymore.”

“It used to be so much easier in the old days,” Athos mused. “All you needed as your credentials was a coat of arms and the air of a true gentleman. Now, they want you to prove your identity.”

We had indeed encountered difficulties on our way from the Adriatic coast to Vienna – albeit nothing that couldn’t be resolved with a well-aimed smile or sword stroke. Still, we were now to travel through civilised countries, where the old tactics would not be efficient in the long run.

The Grigori cleared his throat.

Athos sighed. “What is it, you insufferable pest?”

“With your permission, Kyrios, I must confess I anticipated sirs’ needs. In addition to the breakfast and the horses, I have also had the audacity to organise passports for sirs.” He gestured at official-looking, sealed documents on the tray. “I drafted them myself,” he added with a note of pride in his voice. “I spent all night poring over the details.”

“How did you get the seal?” Athos rolled over on his stomach, reached out and began to unfold one of the passports.

“A very nice young man from the embassy was very helpful. I realise that this is Master Flitterbat’s domain, but he was…” Grimley’s eyes trailed up the length of Athos’ body, to his blood-stained shoulder and neck, “busy.”

Suddenly, Athos’ head dropped into the pillow and his shoulders shook under an onslaught of Homeric laughter. The Grigori prattled on, unabashed. “The documents are only valid for one specific route and have to be signed off every day.”

I ignored him. “What?” I asked with rising apprehension, and pulled the paper out from between Athos’ unresisting fingers. My blood boiled instantly, and it was only due to Athos’ arm that struck out and wrapped itself around me like a constrictor that the Grigori did not lie exsanguinated on the floor.

“You despicable little Olympian _asshole_!” I hissed at the stony-faced so-called angel. “Is this supposed to be funny?”

“I believe Kyrios finds it rather amusing.”

Athos lifted his head and wrestled me down until I was effectively immobilised under his weight. “I am going to drink you dry,” I threatened from my position under my lover’s body.

“Mmm… yes…” He leaned in and kissed me, paying no heed to his infernal guardian who still hovered in the background.

“Prussian seemed like a good identity for sirs to assume,” Grimley was not finished with us yet. “It is a strong, warlike race, and one hears excellent reports of General Blücher. He inspires great love and devotion in his men and can drink with the best of them.”

I wriggled out from Athos’ embrace and reached for the second passport. “Let’s see what fresh horrors...” I scanned the paper quickly and snorted. “Graf von Kyrius?”

Mr Grimley, his eye gleaming dully like polished steel, bowed without a word and retreated to the door. “A good Prussian-sounding name, I fancy.” The door opened, the door closed, our tormentor was gone.

“Graf von Kyrius?” I turned to my lover. “Athos, this is ridiculous.”

“Grimley is right. It is a Prussian-sounding name.”

I lifted my shoulders in a gesture of despair. “You don’t even speak German!”

“I have a week to learn, don’t worry. I believe the Prussians also speak French.”

“Oh, superb! Nobody will suspect a thing. Tell me, Athos: how do you intend to learn a language in a _week_?”

“You’re forgetting, flittermouse: I am a god now. I have the gift of tongues.” He flicked out his tongue in a lewd display of entirely un-godlike talents.

“The God of Discord. How could I forget?” I shook my head. “And for the love of all that is holy – and that does _not_ mean your family – stop calling me by that ridiculous nickname!”

“I’m sorry, Aramis,” he shuffled closer and nuzzled my neck. “How do you want me to call you?” A soft puff of air as he began to laugh again, shaking in my arms. “Herr von Flitterbatt?”

***

**Ghent, June 1815**

“You must be Porthos,” the minxie seductress in an empire-waist dress flashed me her teeth, which eerily reminded me of Aramis, in his better-adjusted days. “The Scourge of the Caribbean? The Black Devil, himself?”

“And you must be the White Fairy,” I bowed deeply, out of respect for her attractiveness. “I believe it was your gnome who came to me in Haiti.”

The woman raised her eyebrow but extended her hand to me to kiss. “You, Monsieur, are a singular man,” she spoke. “Come, let me take you to our mutual friend.”

“Herr von Flitterbatt?” I could not suppress a loud guffaw at the sound of it. 

She smiled at me and her eyes trailed down my torso to the bulge cleverly hidden by the spacious kaftan I had been wearing. The acceptable outfits of the era did not suit me at all, if you catch my drift. Those pantaloons were so narrow and _white_. I did not need any accentuation in the downstairs department. Not in mixed company. Think of the ladies! How were they supposed to control themselves in the presence of such Titanic attributes? 

“And how shall I introduce you, Monsieur?” her eyes sparkled with a dangerous light. “You are not claiming to be from around these parts, though you speak French like a native.”

“I now call myself Akaba, Prince of Dahomey. Not that any native-born Frenchman even knows where Dahomey is - those colonialists think Africa is just one giant wasteland for them to plunder.” 

“This must be a difficult time for you,” she spoke and her hand brushed across my bicep. 

“Not at all, Madame Fairy. As long as the sun shines, I find nothing too difficult an obstacle that it cannot be crushed by me at will.”

“I can see why Aramis likes you.”

“How _is_ dear old Aramis?” I exclaimed, trembling with anticipation. “Does he still travel in coffins?” I asked, solicitous of my old friend's well-being. He had been a mere shadow of himself last he berated me about my alliances of the period.

“See for yourself.” The fairy led me into a brightly lit salon, where I encountered a truly perplexing sight.

I beheld a man whom I presumed to be Aramis, except that he looked miraculously transformed back into the flower of his youth, and more resplendent yet. His skin radiated an almost sun-lit glow, his hair shone like polished onyx, and his eyes that sparkled like jewels were entirely free of the deep, dark circles that had so beset him at our most recent encounters.

This resurrected vision in refined courtly attire of the period was engaged in a heated argument with another fellow, whom I did not recall ever seeing before, in the sombre costume of a maître d’hôtel and with the physiognomy of a handsome devil.

“I don’t _care_ how fetching you think he looks with his new coiffure, I am not going to let you cut my hair, you pestering gnat!”

“But sir,” the aforementioned pestering gnat retorted, “Wearing hair at this length into battle, and without a helmet, is simply not practicable. What if a Frenchman were to grab and pull you by your pig tails?”

“It is perfectly practicable, you insolent shit! That’s why it’s tied back! And where is your Master? I swear to his entire Pantheon, I will eat you until I find a way to make you die from it!”

“Aramis! You’re your old self again!” I declared and threw open my arms so that I could properly embrace the fuming revenant.

My demonic companion of yore turned to behold me and dissolved in a smile as bright as my Da. But, before he had a chance to accept my proffered embrace, the door opened and another gentleman strolled into the room, as if he was striding into the middle of a gladiatorial arena. He had artfully tousled dark hair with sideburns that highlighted his naturally striking cheekbones. His cravat gleamed with such whiteness as to have been washed and starched by the angels themselves and his boots shone with such polish as to reflect his entire tall and slender frame. Despite the sizable bulge in his trousers which would have caused me such discomfort, this man wore his breeches with a certain insouciance that I found almost intimidating. 

“What’s with the hullaballoo?” the man spoke, and that was when my jaw dropped because I had recognized his voice. “Whom must I stab, Aramis, and how deeply?”

“Blimey!” I pronounced, reverting to my pirate patois. “Bloody cuz!”

“Porthos! Ha ha!” And with that exclamation, my dear cousin, whom I have not seen in centuries, hurtled himself upon me with such force as to knock us both to the floor.

As we lay on the parquet, laughing like children, I heard a distinct “Well, there’s an embarrassment of embarrassment!” followed by a “Oh, fuck _off_ , Grimley!” from Aramis. Eventually, we managed to extricate ourselves from each other’s arms and rise from the floor to regain some semblance of decorum.

“I’ll leave you gentlemen to catch up,” the White Fairy said, covering her mouth with a hand encased in a long silk glove, to hide her laughter.

“Thank you, Marion,” Aramis smiled, bowing to her with his customary charm.

“Thank you, Mademoiselle de Lorme. Or is it Delorme these days?” Athos smirked. “No, but honestly, you should try harder.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, _Graf von Kyrius_ ,” the fairy grinned, flashing her brilliant teeth.

Left alone at last, I pulled both Aramis and Athos back into my arms.

“Comrades! Brothers!” I wiped a furtive tear from my eye. “I knew you would get back together!” I released them after kissing their cheeks thoroughly, in the old French tradition. “What kept you two idiots apart for so long, anyways?”

Athos laughed and his eyes sparkled with Olympian amusement.

“Ah… death,” he said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Death kept us apart. My death, to be specific.”

“Athos, don’t,” Aramis’ hand was on his lover’s forearm.

“It’s all right, my love.” I observed in half-pleasure and half-horror as my cousin brushed his fingers along the side of Aramis’ face. Oh yes, this was going to be sickening again. “There is no reason to hide the truth from Porthos. Besides, he’s family.”

“I don’t trust your family, need I remind you?”

“Hey!” I assumed my most offended posture.

“Don’t listen to him, Porthos. For someone who doesn’t trust my family, he sure makes use of their services quite a lot.”

“If by ‘their services’ you mean every time I ride your…”

“...Nope!” I tried to stop him.

“...Horses,” Aramis finished, lifting an eyebrow in my direction.

“I died, Porthos,” Athos interceded. “And Aramis brought me back.”

I clutched at my heart and then clutched at the revenant, pressing him to my heart.

“Oh gods and your baby Jesus! Why didn’t you tell me, you stupid half-man! No wonder you’ve been looking like shit and traveling in coffins!”

“Let go of me, you giant ogre,” Aramis pushed me away with a deep blush.

“Aramis never looks like shit,” Athos fixed me with an offended look.

“Fine. Suit yourself. He’s the prettiest. Don’t duel me!”

“But, regardless,” Athos went on. “That is in the past. And now I’m a full god, so I won’t be dying again.”

“ _How_?”

“How what?”

“So many questions,” I scratched my head. 

“I’ll do my best to answer them,” my cousin offered and it slowly began to dawn on me why he had looked so strikingly different when I first beheld him. It wasn’t just the haircut and the period appropriate garb. It was… that he…

“Are you wearing full armor under your waistcoat?”

“What? No.”

“And a golden cloak?”

“Oh, that’s just the mantle of Discord,” Aramis mewled. “We mostly fuck on it.”

“Tea?”

“And who the fuck is he!” I finally shot, pointing an accusatory finger at the man who reapparated holding a silver tray with a tea pot and matching set of cups on it.

“That’s Grimley,” Athos shrugged. “He’s essentially Grimaud only worse because he pays himself from our coffers.”

“And he's immortal,” Aramis added. “Because your cousin is a sentimental old fool.”

“Kyrios does have a very tender heart,” the tea-bearer pronounced somberly.

“Get lost, Grimley!” the lovers shouted in unison.

“But do leave the tray,” I added. I noticed the finger sandwiches, and truth be told, I was feeling rather peckish. “We’ll need something to snack on while your Master explains why he has been lying by omission to me for the past four hundred years.”

“I…” Athos cast me a chagrinned look from beneath his long eyelashes and Aramis laughed and threw himself into one of the armchairs, steepling his fingers as if in anticipation of a show.

“Yes?” I pressed without mercy. “You what?”

“I am the God of Discord,” he said.

“Terrific,” I took the other arm chair next to Aramis. “Start at the beginning.”

It promised to be a rather entertaining evening, all told.

***

**Waterloo, 18 June 1815**

Did Lord Wellington truly shout into the heavens “Give me night, or give me Blücher!” at Waterloo?

Night came. Night had brought Blücher.

“Which will it be, lover mine?” Aramis had asked. “Exposed nipples or bedeviling?”

“General Blücher is an honorable man,” I replied with a smirk.

“Nipples it is, then.”

“I doubt it will get that far, Herr von Flitterbatt,” my smirk deepened.

Blücher did not hesitate long, to his credit, and my shirt and dignity remained intact, much to Aramis’ disappointment.

Major Lützow, history would tell us, discovered the French downfall of leaving the Wood of Paris unoccupied and thus exposing their entire right flank to attack. Major Lützow would not remember how Aramis’ teeth flashed at him in the darkness of the wood.

Night came, riding in on winged horses, her black cloak to mimic my own as it extended over the battlefield of Waterloo. Wellington had been in trouble. The Corsican pygmy and his men, in whom I no longer recognized compatriots, pressed him hard. Their barbaric tri-color flag flew in the face of decency. The First French empire… I felt rage rise within me. I had fought for Hadrian and Alexander: _those_ had been true empires. 

My nostrils flared from the smell of blood. Between my thighs, my stallion reared with anticipation. 

“Steady, Bucephalus,” I whispered, stroking his mane.

“I can’t believe you named your horse after your ex-lover’s horse,” Aramis sneered beside me.

“Alexander named an entire city after that beast, I can name a horse after him. Bucephalus was a magnificent creature, worthy of commemoration.”

“Oh look,” Porthos interceded before Aramis and I got too distracted from hunger of battle by hunger of the flesh, “Is that your Da?” He pointed at a raptor making circles over the battlefield. I could not tell in the darkness whether it had been an eagle.

“Be careful, flittermouse, that he doesn’t scoop you up,” I laughed and spurred my steed downwards into the fray.

_I invoke you, Ares the magnificent, Ares the enraged, Ares the bearer of swords, bring with you protection and strength._

I did not need my brother’s protection and strength any longer; still, the ancient, sacred words came to me unbidden. The pagan drumbeat of my own heart guided the blows of my arm. Next to me, I heard the raucous thunder of Porthos’ laughter. Blood sprayed across my face, men fell beneath the hooves of my Bucephalus, their bones crushed.

Night came, and with it our cavalry, falling on Napoleon’s men like Burnham Wood fell upon Macbeth. We went straight for Plancenoit, where the French Young Guard Division would tragically lose ninety-six percent of its constituency, all because my flittermouse refused to stomach a more mature and less virile vintage.

Men fell, and in the distance I heard the clashes of a thousand swords. A canon ball exploded next to me, throwing my would-be assailants aside like so much tri-color rubbish. My ears did not ring, only the sound of my blood pulsing through my veins lulled me like an internal lullaby. But not to sleep - to slaughter. Someone’s bayonet aimed at my throat. I moved it out of the way, more annoyed than threatened, when it returned like a vexing mosquito and pierced through my side. 

“Get out of my way, stupid man,” I said, withdrawing the weapon from my wound, to my assailant’s stupefaction, and bludgeoning him with the butt of his own musket. He fell and behind him another face gaped at me as he watched my wound close before his very eyes. “Where is your little Corsican?” I asked one of the Young Guard musketeers. “I’d have words with him.”

Before the young man could respond, he went limp, held aloft in mid-air: Aramis’ teeth had pierced his jugular.

“You’re bleeding,” my lover said, panting, his mouth still crimson from the dead man’s blood.

“I’m perfectly all right, kitten,” I reassured him.

“Stop chatting up my dinner, then,” he stepped towards me.

“I’ve told you many times not to play with your food, Aramis.” My thumb drew across his lips, wiping the blood off and then presenting it for my demonic lover to suck clean.

“Not _now_ , you fucking deviants!” Porthos flew past us on horseback, spraying us both with the blood of another. We breathed heavily.

“I can see it again,” Aramis exhaled, his eyes narrowing even as his nostrils flared.

“What?”

“Your armor. Discord’s armor. It’s…”

“Behind you!”

Aramis flipped his sword backwards and some unfortunate, clumsy fool impaled himself upon it.

" _Sauvons nos aigles!_ " someone had cried.

Plancenoit was ours, but the Corsican pretender had eluded me. The coalition cavalry, with Porthos in the lead, pursued the French fugitives and molested them as much as possible, whilst elsewhere Wellington and Blücher must have toasted divine intervention like newfound brothers.

In the reclaimed village square, which was littered with corpses of the Young Guard, I pushed Aramis backwards until he tripped on some unfortunate’s leg.

“This one’s still warm.”

“Is chyortik feeling peckish again?”

“Not _that_ peckish!” Aramis pulled a face and I laughed, sinking down over him and dropping my weapons. I slipped in human blood and stumbled until we both lay on the evidence of sacrifice we had offered to the god of War. “It’s gone,” he breathed into my mouth. “Your regalia. What a pity.”

“Sweet flittermouse, you’ll make me feel insufficient,” I giggled into his neck and licked a long stripe up to the tip of his pointed chin.

“They couldn’t see it, but I could,” he spoke as if still in a battle daze. “You were so beautiful, like that. My God of Discord. My Angel of Death.”

I pushed him roughly back until his skull collided with the skull of a corpse.

“You’ll get brains on me.”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, I…” I shut him up with my mouth over his. His hands pulled at my hair even as mine pulled at his clothes. 

Napoleon is said to have lost about twenty-six thousand men that day. A beautiful spray of diamonds for my brother’s cloak. Was there ever such carnage before Waterloo? Humans, they always came up with better, more efficient ways to kill each other. They still do.

“Don’t…” Aramis’ hand stopped me from pulling his mud and blood strained breeches all the way down.

“Why not?”

“Oh, come on!” He emphatically moved his elbow and pressed it into a departed Frenchman’s ass. The formerly human pile beneath us was beginning to ripen, but I wasn’t going to have that interfere with my plans.

“You Slavic demons are squeamish about the strangest things!”

“At least have the decency to put your fuck-blanket down!”

“My mantle is not our fuck-blanket!” I protested. “And you took me on a repugnant bear-skin rug once, need I remind you!”

“This is better?”

With an eyeroll of exasperation, I lay Discord’s mantle down for my beloved to roll onto. “Happy now?”

“Happy enough.”

“Then turn over, mein Herr.”

With less preparation than I would have normally taken, I was sheathed inside him, our bodies moving with the wild urgency exacerbated by the heat of battle still coursing through our blood. Aramis cried out and his exclamations of ecstasy mixed with the moans of the dying on the battlefields. My hand pulled at him roughly and my teeth latched onto the side of his neck, as if I and not he was the blood-drinking creature of darkness. His arm reached up to pull at my hair where Grimley had artfully styled it longer in the front. He turned his head, his lips seeking out my own, and I felt him spill into my fist as I drank in his moan.

***

Serious historians will tell you that the encounter between Wellington and Blücher in the Belle Alliance tavern, which has been depicted in countless images, had never taken place and is merely one of those legends that simple folk come up with. But then – serious historians couldn’t tell truth from legend if it manifested in front of them and rammed its fangs into their throat.

The Belle Alliance resembled an anthill that night. Officers, dripping with sweat and blood, and oozing something else, something sweeter and more potent, something that made my fangs and my loins tingle, were streaming in and out of the room, turning it into a boiling, churning witch’s cauldron. Nobody paid Athos and me any heed when we sidled in, our blood heaving in our veins from our frantic coupling on the nameless foe. The mantle of Discord had rustled and hissed its displeasure as it curled itself around Athos’ arm, losing its corporeal form now that its services were no longer required.

Papa Blücher was seated at a table, his moustache bristling, his grey hair matted with sweat and dust, but his posture as rigid as that of any Prussian officer and his eyes sparkling like those of a whippersnapper. Oh, his lifeforce was potent, his vigour unbroken, and the bloodlust in his veins was sweet. No wonder his men venerated him. Even Athos and I had been impressed when we first met the celebrated general. Athos had commended Grimley on his excellent choice, and the diabolic domestic had smirked like the smug bastard that he had regenerated into.

Across from Blücher, Wellington was pouring French wine down his throat like Silenus. Athos pressed my hand, and I stepped out of the shadow, catching the Irishman’s eye. He frowned at the sight of my smile and my salute, and then his gaze trailed over to Athos, who was glaring at him like the Thunderous Father himself, his shoulders squared and his chin jutted out in unspoken challenge. Athos had been outraged when I had told him that Wellington was a supporter of what he referred to as ‘Ottoman territorial integrity’ and by which he meant that he sanctioned the Ottoman rule over Greece.

“Hellas ruled the world when his forefathers still crawled in the mud,” the God of Discord had sneered. “I had forgotten my Achaean roots for too long, Aramis. I had indulged in lassitude, in wine, in _Frenchness_. They estranged me from my own heritage. And now – Prussian!” he exclaimed, lifting an arm to heavens in a perfect display of Greek histrionics. “How can I be Prussian? I, the son of Zeus!”

“You will have to discuss this with Mr Grimley, Graf von Kyrius,” I shrugged, full of joyful anticipation.

Athos grimaced. “Shut up, Herr von Flitterbatt, or I shall chastise you most severely. What is this world into which you brought me back? First the steam engine – I shudder to think what the English come up with next – and now I am faced with the choice of giving my allegiance to the Scylla of the Corsican gnome or the Charybdis of the ignorant Irish upstart.”

“Forget Wellington,” I bent my head and bit lightly into his earlobe until he hissed and arched into me. “General Blücher is worthy of your allegiance, my love. Think of him when your sword ploughs through the throng of Napoleonic _citizens_ in battle. I believe it will be most diverting. They don’t call him Marschall Vorwärts for nothing.”

“Hmm…” Athos murmured with his eyes closed, turning his head to grant me better access. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, Aramis. You are just trying to distract me from my righteous indignation.”

“I believe it’s working.” I snaked my hand between both our bodies and reached for his hard cock. “And you are forgetting one thing to be indignant about,” I whispered into his ear and felt a spasm run through his whole body. “Sodomy…” I pushed the tip of my cock into him and trailed my lips down his neck, “is severely frowned upon… even among soldiers.” Athos exhaled sharply and I shoved my cock all the way in, pinning him to the mattress. “And that’s never stopped you from taking your pleasure-” The rest of my words were drowned out by the torrent of blood that surged into my mouth.

Wellington never knew that he had made an enemy in the God of Discord. As we walked past the table where he and Blücher were drinking, he took us for two officers in the Prussian army who paid their respect to their commanding officer. Papa Blücher, puffing and blowing like an aging bear, entertained the company with tales of the devious French, who had heated the floor of his chamber until it burned red-hot and forced him to walk on tiptoes. “They did it to _me_ , those barbarians!” he exclaimed, thumping his chest with his fist. “To me! Even though I am with child by an elephant!”

“Did you perhaps scramble his brain too severely, chyortik?” Athos whispered as we climbed the stairs to the room which Grimley had procured for us, despite the fact that countless higher-ranking officers had more claim on it than we did.

“It has nothing to do with me,” I protested and smacked him on the arse as he walked through the door before me. “It’s the drink-induced lunacy talking. Perhaps it’s his idea of a joke. Porthos likes him.”

“Porthos aspires to be like him. Sans the pregnancy.”

“A propos, has Porthos told you that he produced offspring again?” I threw down my weapons and sniffed appreciatively. The smell of soap mingled with the smell of food, as Grimley had obviously bullied the landlord not only into preparing a private dinner for us in our own room, but also into setting up a bath. “This time by a French tavern wench. The Titan blood is indecently polluted. One day, we should have a talk with him.”

Athos, who had thrown himself into a chair and was pulling off his boots, merely waved an elegant hand. “Trifles,” he grunted. “The Titan blood was always earthy rather than sublime.”

“Unlike Olympian blood,” I threw in, my voice light as air.

Athos looked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I was unwrapping my cravat and unbuttoning my coat daintily. “The curse is lifted, oh valiant Olympian warrior. Have the implications never occurred to you?”

He was frowning at me. “Aramis, what…” Suddenly, he grinned. “Do you expect me to throw myself at a _woman_?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Athos stared at me and suddenly, he started to laugh. He sagged in his chair, doubled-up as mirth shook him from head to foot. “I missed you, chyortik,” he gasped finally. “I missed _laughing_. There isn’t much laughter in the Underworld, everything is very sombre and portentous.”

I had turned away from him, struggling with the last button of my coat, as ire bubbled up in my breast. Then, soft footsteps, his warm hand on my arm, snaking around my chest, his chin on my shoulder and his mouth against my cheek. “Are you _jealous_?” he whispered, and crystals of laughter swirled and dissolved in his voice like crystals of sugar in tea. “Of whom, Aramis? Marie is dead.”

“Marie is not the only woman who will find you dashing.”

“You say that? You? Five days after you introduced me to your latest mistress, you are reproaching me with spectres of imaginary women whom I might or might not fuck?”

In spite of myself, my cock twitched. The word ‘fuck’, spoken in that warm, vibrating voice so close to my mouth, was enough to elicit a response in my body. He sensed it, naturally, and the arm around my chest tightened. The other hand slithered around my hip and cupped me, lightly, through my breeches.

“How can I prove to you that I’m yours, Aramis?” he purred filthily, rubbing my swelling cock with a practised hand.

“Take your clothes off.” I snarled, angry at my own flesh that deserted me and hurried to join his banner the moment he touched me.

“You first.” His fingers alighted on the buttons of my breeches, my shirt. The vat was only a few paces away. Even as I listened to the sound of Athos’ ragged breathing and the rustling of his clothes behind me, I scanned the room for the bottle of oil. In my mind’s eye, an image was rising like Aphrodite from sea foam: Athos on his knees, biting into his hand to stifle his moans. Water drops on his skin, water lapping at his thighs, as he clutched at the edge of the vat, panting, panting, pushing back onto my fingers that worked him open. Beautiful. Begging. _Mine_.


	2. The Mysteries of Paris

**Paris, July 15, 1815**

The God of Discord lay sprawled across the bed, making soft sounds of contentment in the back of his throat. When I pressed my fingers to his damp skin, I fancied I could feel his neck vibrate with deep purrs.

“What do you think, Athos?” I mouthed against his skin. “Has the Corsican been caught yet?”

“Hm?” Athos turned his head and blinked lazily, like a man struggling to keep himself awake. “What made you think of him?”

“You said his name in your sleep, last night.” I stretched out, pressing my groin into his stomach and my knee between his thighs. “Did your family visit you again? To tell you what happened?”

“No.” Athos shook his head and his free hand alighted on my hair, stroking and caressing and raising goosebumps in the back of my neck. All of a sudden, he looked pensive. “They haven’t spoken to me in a while.”

‘ _Good_ ,’ I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud. The deification of my lover had seemed an excellent joke, as much as a triumph. Certainly no man on earth was more worthy of being called a god than Athos. And yet, my skin prickled with irritation at the thought that the Hellenic pantheon whom I had sought to destroy had disarmed me. I had been a Christian warrior for centuries. I fought at the side of a pagan god now. His family must have thought it a magnificent joke, and their cunning had proved worthy of d’Artagnan himself. They weren’t smart, those ancient deities; but they knew how to survive.

“What is it, Aramis?” Athos whispered, watching me with hooded eyes. His fingers threaded through my hair, tingled against my skin, until I began to feel lightheaded and melted into him. I turned away from the familiar heathen smirk that curled in the corner of his mouth and licked a long path along the swell of his shoulder. My tongue traced the line of his shoulder joint, just above his armpit, and Athos’ body jolted into mine. The muscles in his arm flexed under my lips and tongue, as I continued to lick his skin in slow, thorough strokes. I was so hard, I wondered that he didn’t complain, for my cock pressed like a rod into his stomach. When I reached the crook of his elbow, I trailed my tongue deliberately over the throbbing vein, teasing it until it swelled in the same way that his cock did against my hip. It called out to me, the miracle tonic, a concoction brewed by the gods themselves and poured into a vessel whose beauty never failed to take my breath away. The perfect alignment of those lines and planes, each in elegant balance with the others: the length of his neck, the broadness of his shoulders, the power coiled in the muscles of his arm. The slender wrist. I pressed an open-mouthed kiss into the palm of his hand and it twitched under my caress, tugging against the bond that tied it to the bedpost.

I slithered up his body and kissed his palm again, nibbling at the soft flesh of the Mount of Venus. Athos stirred beneath me and his hot lips brushed against my shoulder. His fingers were loose and relaxed, and they trembled under the heat of my breath. I licked one of his digits, from base to tip, and then sucked it in to feel Athos gasp and quiver.

“Aramis,” he whispered again, and his breath was another caress against my shoulder and neck. His hand lay open before me, palm-upward, and for a moment, I fancied I saw my own heart right there in the centre, beating in time with his pulse. I licked across his palm with my tongue and my teeth and tasted the salt of his sweat and the sweetness of _him_.

The pale ring around his forefinger. The scar that he wore because of me. I curled my tongue around it and, beneath me, Athos’ body undulated like an Aegean wave. The hand in my hair slid down my neck and spine, and his nails scraped over my vertebrae to make me shiver.

“Where did you put it?” A low purr in my ear and my skin tautened. “Hm? Aramis?”

In lieu of an answer, I tightened my teeth around the ring-scar. A puff of hot breath hit my neck, and Athos’ fingers dug into the flesh of my arse. I cupped his jaw, his cheek, dipping my fingers into the silky curls. All those weeks, and I had not yet gotten used to the sight: his short hair, brushed into his face, highlighting the contours of his cheekbones. He looked different since his resurrection: thinner than he’d been in Bragelonne, more loose-limbed than ever. Taller, too, as if the stint in the bivouac by the Stygian shores had turned him back into a still-growing youth. He would never die again, and his body would forever bear the mark that I had left there.

I no longer wore the severed finger bone around my neck. The talisman was hidden away among my possessions, while the living, breathing god lay in my arms.

I sucked the next finger into my mouth and pressed the tip of my fang into the pad, slow and hard, until the skin broke and a drop of blood pearled to the surface. It dissolved on the tip of my tongue. It seeped into my bloodstream. It warmed my heart and my loins.

My fingers wrapped around his bound wrist, I felt his pulse jump in time with the frantic beat of his heart against my ribcage. I thrust my tongue between his fingers, licking and sucking at the flesh there, and Athos arched and moaned filthily, squeezing my arse hard. He turned his head and my thumb slipped into his mouth, even as I was sucking in the next finger. His skin broke under the pressure of my fang and I lapped the dark red drop off.

“What are you doing?” Athos mumbled around my thumb.

“Savouring.”

“You know where you can savour more extensively.” He rubbed the inside of his thigh against my hip.

“Patience, M. le comte.” I nibbled at his fingertip. “I will drink you dry yet.”

His mouth on my neck, his teeth, his tongue, the heat of his breath, and his voice, the low growl of a predator about to strike: “I can’t wait.”

The door opened, and from within the sanctuary of our curtained four-poster bed, we heard the click-clack of Grimley’s immaculately polished heels. Athos’ finger slipped out of my mouth and his hand balled into a fist. “What is it, Grimley?” Athos growled, just as the valet sprung from Dante’s own Inferno was saying, “Good afternoon, sirs. I believe the seven days are over.”

I caught Athos’ eye and flashed my fangs at him, accompanying the snarl with a meaningful gesture of my head in the direction of the pestering Olympian. Athos sighed and shook his head in response to my nonverbal question.

“Sirs have been celebrating His Majesty’s, King Louis XVIII – may his reign be long and blessèd – restoration to the throne for a week. It is time to disentangle yourselves from the sheets and return to the world of the living.” The rustle of window curtains being drawn, and sunlight streamed into the room. It filtered through the drapes of our bed and a few bold rays fell askance on Athos’ face, turning his eyes into pools of liquid amber.

I let my head sink on Athos’ shoulder and pressed my forehead into the crook of his neck, while his hand rubbed soothing circles on my back. “Let’s kill him,” I breathed.

“We can’t,” he breathed back, and then he sighed. “Get a bath ready, Grimley!”

“I have anticipated Kyrios’ wishes. Bathwater is on its way.”

“I hate you.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Get out!”

“Very well, sir. I leave your letters on the nightstand, Herr Graf. Herr von Flitterbatt.”

Footsteps again, coming closer; the drapes trembled, stirred by Grimley’s movement, and then the clink of the letter tray as he put it down. “I see sirs have drunk all the wine,” he remarked in an offhand voice. “I shall send more up. Will Kyrios require any additional nourishment? I assume Herr von Flitterbatt has not suffered pangs of hunger while he was confined to his bed.”

“Fuck off!”

“Very well, Herr Graf.”

The door closed. I rolled off my lover and untied the rope around his wrist. “ _Why_ did we decide to keep him?”

“So that we won’t be forced to kill innocent bystanders who discover our identities when we get carried away. Grimley makes sure we don’t get too cocky.”

“Are you accusing us of hubris _again_?”

“Chyortik.” He smiled and rolled over on his side, propping his head up on his hand. “You are _always_ full of hubris.” His hip slanted, his back arched into a beautiful curve, like a frozen wave; his stomach glistening with moisture, his cock nestled into the rumpled sheets, not fully hard anymore, but even more enticing for its state of semi-arousal. I leaned in and bit into the hard muscle of his shoulder. “That’s why I love you,” he concluded his speech. I shuffled closer, folded myself over him and licked a stripe down his back.

“Don’t, Aramis.” His voice was breathless. “Grimley is right, we told him to give us a week and then-”

I grabbed his arse with one hand and pulled him open. “It won’t take long.” My finger slid in easily. “You’re still so soft…”

“Stop. It.”

Two fingers deep inside him, massaging the spot that made him moan against my skin.

“You’re evil.”

“On your hands and knees, Herr Graf.” I slithered over him, behind him, oil dripping from my fingers, onto my cock, into his cleft, and he was opening up for me, his back curved and his face hidden in the pillows. The heat around my cock as he clamped down on me, and the scent of his blood as it pumped through his veins and muscles. I bent over him and bit into his earlobe. “Don’t hold back,” I whispered, pulling my hips back only to slam back into him with full force. “ _I_ won’t.”

His arse was flushed red by the time I had finished with him, and the insides of his thighs were slick and sticky. He had given himself to me again and again all night, and for most of the morning, his body begging and pliant under my hands. This last, desperate fuck had been urgent and frantic. We spent ourselves hard after a few thrusts, before the servants came in with the bath. Murmurs of voices, clanking of buckets and water sploshing in the far corner of the room, while our bodies were cooling hidden away behind the drapes. I took Athos’ hand in mine and lifted it to my mouth.

“What is it?” I asked the moment the door closed and we were alone again.

“Nothing.”

“Why, then, do you let me fuck you like this?”

His hand twitched, but I didn’t let go. After a moment of silence, he said: “Like what, Aramis?”

“Like you wanted me to punish you.” I trailed my thumb over his wrist, where the rope had been chafing against his skin.

“I-” He turned his head away and I waited for the words I knew he couldn’t say. “Don’t be silly, Aramis. There’s nothing punishing about…”

“Do you want to do it in front of the mirror, then? So that we can both watch your face?”

I had pushed him too far. He pulled his hand out of my grip and turned away from me, pulling the drapes away and reaching for the bundle of letters. “For you.” He tossed half a dozen billets at me. “From the fairy.”

He was in the bath when I had finished reading, reclining in the vat with his eyes closed. I stepped closer, picked up his razor from the dressing table and twirled it between my fingers thoughtfully.

“What does the fairy want?” he asked without opening his eyes.

I smirked, knelt down behind him and cupped his jaw with one hand. “She’s asking for our help, Athos.” I ran the cool steel of the still-folded razor along the ridge of his jaw. “Would you like me to shave you?”

The corner of his mouth twitched, and the ghost of a smile appeared. “Please.”

“She’s asking us to come and see her, tonight.” I told him while the blade glided across his soap-soaked face and neck. “There will be a guide waiting for us, carrying a lantern. We must not speak to him. We must follow the light.”

“Is that what you want to do, Aramis?”

“Yes.” I scraped the blade over his jugular vein. “Napoleon wasn’t your responsibility, Athos,” I said.

His body stiffened, but with the razor at his neck, he couldn’t move away.

“We should have killed him, Aramis,” he said eventually. “ _I_ should have killed him. He’d made a pact with the water gods of my native seas. We should have stopped him. It should have been us, not the English or the Prussians.”

“We _are_ Prussian.”

He grimaced. “Only on paper.”

“I was under the impression that you respect General Blücher.”

“He is a great man. But you and I, Aramis,” he opened his eyes and pinned me down with that dark gaze of his, “we are as un-Prussian as can be.”

“Ah! Does Mr Grimley know?”

“He is drafting new passports even as we speak.”

We did follow the light. After dusk, after dark, a shadow stirred in the mouth of an alley across the road, surrounded by a circle of pale, yellow light. Athos and I, shrouded in our cloaks, the brims of our hats pulled down to shield our faces, stepped into the narrow lane. We kept out of the trembling circle, following it like shadows, like ghosts. Across the bridge, black waters rolling lazily under our feet. Another alley, as narrow and dark as the first. Above our heads, the houses leaned in, putting their heads together and mumbling, gossiping, watching us with the dark windows of their souls. Sometimes, we caught a glimpse of a candle flickering behind half-closed shutters. Its tendrils spilled out into the air, as if to mingle with the light carried by our voiceless guide. The air here was thick and stagnant. The Anemoi never strayed into those hidden corners; and if one of them happened to get trapped in the underbelly of the city, it howled and rattled at doors and windows with the vigour of a condemned spirit.

Another dark alley, steps down towards the river, where the half-living, half-dead clung to their miserable existence feeding on waste and Seine waters, and then the circle of light flickered into a wider lane, stopped, and faded.

Athos and I exchanged a glance. The odours bubbling up from the basement told us what kind of place that was: the silent light had led us to a morgue.

***

“I am the count von Kyrius, at the service of General Blücher, and this is our army surgeon, Dr. Flitterbatt. We’re here to examine the body.”

Aramis glared at me, though I was not sure whether he objected to being termed a physician or that I had made him a commoner. 

The pale man with hollowed out cheekbones looked at our paperwork and then examined each of our faces with the distrust more appropriate to one guarding the integrity of the living than the dead.

“Ohh, Herr Graf, you speak our language so very well,” he drawled out sycophantically.

“Hm, yes,” I said, straightening my spine into a rigid column that made me tower over the guardian of the morgue. “To my greatest chagrin, I assure you.”

Aramis smiled; we passed through the gate into the _sancta sanctorum_ of the murdered and the unknown.

Inside a small room with a cold slab in the middle, a body lay covered with a flimsy, white sheet. A dark-haired woman stood leaning over the departed, whose face alone had been exposed to the elements out of some perverse respect for her mortal coil. 

“Why have you brought us here, Marion?” Aramis asked the fairy.

“Come closer, Aramis,” she beckoned, her voice projecting a sharp-edged, steely sort of sadness. We approached the body of the woman, but I was more interested in observing the Dame Blanche than an inanimate corpse. “Do you see this? This - is a body of a nymph.”

“That’s impossible,” I spoke. “This woman had clearly drowned.”

“I am the one with extensive experience with corpses, Herr Graf,” Aramis sneered and then directed his eyes to the distended, blue face of the victim. “And my medical opinion is, this woman drowned.”

“Nevertheless, I tell you - she was a nymph!” Marion pressed, her mouth assuming a scowl. “They’re back, Aramis. And now they have found a way to keep nymphs trapped in corporeal forms, so they can kill them.”

“Preventing them from turning to water,” I muttered and redirected my eyes at the Dame Blanche. “You’re certain she was a nymph?” Marion answered with a gesture of exasperation.

“What is it to me?” Aramis turned from the table. “One dead nymph. The waters are full of them, aren’t they?”

“How can you speak that way of a sister of the woman we loved!” Marion exclaimed with cutting reproach.

“ _We_ loved?” I redirected.

“What? No, I said ‘you loved,’ the both of you.”

“No, that’s not what you said,” I smiled at her, my mind unwittingly conjuring up images of her and Marie. “Marion, I never knew you were one to enjoy… wetness.” Aramis hit me. “What, with you being a Highland Fairy and everything, I mean.”

“Stop picturing them together,” Aramis whispered hotly against my earlobe.

“I was not!” I protested, realizing immediately that I had told a lie. I could not at that moment tell what Aramis had been more outraged by, the fact that my mind had conjured up the same images that his very likely did, or the fact that I had gained the ability to lie without blushing.

“Come down from Olympus, Graf von Kyrius,” Marion laughed. “Yes, I loved Marie. All that shows is that we all share excellent tastes in our lovers.” At this point, both our eyes traveled towards Aramis who bit his lips and drew the sheet over the dead nymph’s face.

“This is what your father was talking about, Athos,” he spoke after a moment’s silence. 

“The hunters of the supernatural?”

“Their power is growing,” Marion whispered. “Today a nymph, tomorrow a fairy. And the next day, perhaps a _god_.” Aramis hissed like a serpent about to strike and I placed the palm of my hand against his lower back, feeling his muscles relax under my touch.

“She wasn’t threatening me, angel,” I whispered into his ear. “She wants our help, and it is our duty to aid her.”

“It would appear that the desires of Olympus and of Faerie have aligned?” the Dame Blanche asked.

“Yes, Madame,” I bowed curtly. “Let’s kill them all.”

***

We had to strike whilst the proverbial iron was still hot. Aramis’ Queen Mab may have been powerful in her own realms, but trapped in a human world, in her human form, she had to play by human rules. At the end of the day, so did I.

“I know where they have holed up,” she leaned over a map spread out in the study of her Parisian apartments, where we had retired once our business at the morgue had been completed. Paris had changed since my last death, but I recognized many of the street names. “One of my familiars had followed their scent to a safe house. It’s close to the Luxembourg. Here,” her finger landed near the square of St. Sulpice and I smiled up at her.

“Rue de Vaugirard? You’re joking.”

“Ah yes, I believe you know that neighborhood well,” Marion’s lips pursed.

“How many of them are there?” I asked.

“Be it twenty, what is it to you?” She straightened her back, like the consummate dancer she was, and blew out the candle, casting us all in darkness. A hood hid her dark curls and fell over her forehead. “Are you afraid, God of Discord?”

“We don’t know how they killed the nymph,” I responded, undaunted by her taunting. “We know nothing about their tools or the extent of their power.”

“They’ve been consorting with poets,” Aramis sneered. “Those damned Romantics who seek union with the supernatural, like maenads running naked through the woods. It’s an embarrassment, Athos.”

“I presume the nymph wasn’t kept corporeal by a badly composed poem.” I followed Aramis and Marion down the stairs and found myself in the streets of Paris once more. The linden trees were in bloom again, their heady aroma wafting too many memories my way.

“Perhaps,” the Dame Blanche spoke in her tuneful voice, “if you’re worried about being overpowered, you should not have let your friend Porthos sail off to Africa.”

“I have long since finished with telling Porthos what to do,” Aramis replied, quietly. There was a tremulous note underlying his words and I took his hand in mine, by instinct. Did he still blame himself for what had transpired back in 1665? His fingers interlaced with mine briefly, but then, as if remembering himself, he drew away. 

Right. He did not want me to treat him like a child.

He had almost been one, and a petulant child at that, when I had first met him, back in Wallachia. Since Waterloo, I had often thought of that day, how Fate had led my Slavic demon to me upon that battlefield. Now, more than four centuries later, we were no closer to knowing the truth of his origins, whereas my own origins had found a way to consume and remake me in their own image. If there were humans in this world who could kill nymphs, they would know how to kill revenants, and I could not let them go on existing.

“Is this the reason she reattached your head, flittermouse?” I asked, forcing him to fall into step with me behind Marion’s cloaked back. “She needed a revenant to do her dirty work?”

“You’re the one who wanted to help her,” he whispered back.

“She never showed any interest in you before,” I shrugged. “When she was Richelieu’s mistress.”

“You think she’s walking us into a trap?” 

“You trust her?”

“I do.”

“Then so shall I.”

The bells of St. Sulpice sounded midnight, the witching hour, and I felt a shiver run through my body. Like the aroma of the linden trees, I had remembered those bells only too well. Late nights spent sleepless, wondering if he would come to me. My lover, who spurned my bed for the arms of a nymph. _Marie_. Marie, how lucky you were not to live to see this day! A nymph - drowned, by perfidious human hands. What diabolical magic was at play?

“We have arrived, gentlemen.” Marion pointed out a two storey house with a solitary light in a center window at the top floor, making it resemble a towering Cyclops.

“How do they do it?” I asked, still not able to wrap my mind around what these _hunters_ were capable of. “I’ve seen Marie turn to water before my own eyes…” I thanked the gods for the cloak of night because Aramis’ gaze burned into my face and I blushed underneath the heat of it. I took out a handkerchief and pretended to blow my nose, which only seemed to outrage him more.

“Sniffles, count?” he hissed.

“No, flittermouse, I’m allergic to _bullshit_!” I hissed back.

“Is it just me you don’t trust, or is still _all_ women?” Marion turned, her fox-like eyes glowing from beneath the fringe of her cloak.

“Marie had summoned these hunters up from gods know where,” I replied, approaching the Dame Blanche until I stood face to face with her. Her breath was like a winter breeze on my skin. “I won’t ask again what caused the rift between you two,” I turned to Aramis, “for it is clear enough you will not speak of it. And now you,” I pointed at the fairy, “are telling me that the same group of men who had once served at her pleasure, are running around Paris, drowning nymphs in their own element.”

“You’ve been gone for a long time,” Marion replied with cold composure. Her unflappable nature would have appealed to me at any other moment, except that I was still not sure about her intentions. “A lot has changed.”

“And now you tell us you and Marie were - what? Lovers?”

She leaned towards me, and out of habit of thousands of years, I drew back. The fairy laughed. “I think I have proven my point sufficiently.” She turned to Aramis, “Well, my dark chevalier, it appears it will be up to you to convince your paramour of my honorable intentions.”

Aramis shook his head and, like the creature of the night that he was, traversed the street in the blink of an eye. I had not had the pleasure of watching him climb a wall since centuries ago in Bragelonne, and my heart palpitated inside my chest as my eyes caressed his agile form, the devil’s own kitten springing up to peek into our enemies’ window at midnight.

“There are three of them,” Aramis spoke, suddenly reappearing at our side. “They are preparing for bed.”

“Perfect,” Marion smiled baring her diamond-like teeth. “There are three of us.” A blade flashed in her hand. So, I had been wrong: the fairy did not mind getting her own hands dirty. Her cloak fell open, revealing the glow of her signature white gown under the silver light of the half-moon.

“How do we know they are the men we want?” I asked.

“We can search the room for clues after,” Aramis shrugged.

“After we… kill them?”

“Since when do pagan deities care about the fates of a handful of mortals?” Aramis taunted.

“Do not misapprehend me, Aramis. I’m perfectly happy to kill the men responsible for drowning a nymph. But again, we only have _her_ word for the fact that they’re the ones responsible. In fact, we only have her word for that body in the morgue belonging to a nymph at all!”

“You’re welcome to run me through, count,” the Dame Blanche grinned, “if it turns out that I have led you astray. Once they’re dead.”

I forced myself to exhale and took another step away from her. She was beautiful and wild, with her long neck and her black hair, she stood unafraid and proud. An _ignis fatuus_ leading men to their doom. A true daughter of the gods. She reminded me of my departed sister and, for a moment, I could almost picture a halo of black wings around her head.

Aramis certainly knew how to pick them.

“Keep behind me, Madame,” I finally said and headed across the street towards the house. The light had gone out in the upstairs window and now the building stared down at us with vacant, black eyes, as if it too was turning willfully blind to the murders we were about to commit.

Aramis had climbed up again and availed himself of the window that had been left open to allow an errant summer breeze to enter the rooms. A few seconds later, he had unlatched the door from the inside and allowed me and Marion to enter with a gallant bow. 

The house slept the sleep of the condemned. Like shadows, the three of us glided up the stairs until each one of us had located our intended victim and plunged our blades into their hearts. Behind me, I heard someone utter a dying groan and I turned with anger, my hand still clamped over the mouth of the man who expired by my hand.

“You did not gag yours?” I chided the Dame Blanche.

“Sorry!” she whispered in the darkness. “This is the first time I actually had to… you know.”

“I somehow find that hard to believe,” I muttered when suddenly the door flew open and a madman wearing only a night shirt and slippers threw himself upon us while swinging the saber and brandishing a crucifix before his face.

Before he had the chance to do any damage, Aramis had separated his head from his body with one sure slice of his own sword. The would-be assassin’s head made a grotesque arc in the air until it landed in the lap of Marion’s pristine, white dress and finally rolled to the floor.

“Ugh! Aramis! My dress!” the fairy cried in outrage.

I laughed and handed her my handkerchief. “Madame, if I may, you have human all over your face.”

Her fingers brushed against mine as she took the proffered symbol of our future friendship and her lips curled into a smile, which I returned.

Aramis cleared his throat. “I had not seen him. He must have been asleep in the other room.”

“We should search the house, to make sure there aren’t any more surprises,” Marion suggested, very sensibly.

After a brief but thorough search, the other rooms had proven to be empty. Marion lowered her dagger, Aramis retracted his fangs, and I sheathed my sword, letting a sigh of relief escape. I walked up to Aramis and pointed to the beheaded corpse, which still clutched the crucifix in its rigid hand. “Did you see, kitten? He was brandishing your god on a stick at us.”

Aramis was about to grace me with, no doubt, some snide remark which would have exalted Christ and put down my entire lineage, when we heard Marion utter another cry from an adjacent room and rushed to her side.

“Monsters!” the Dame Blanche shivered with rage. “Holy water! They used holy water!”

Before us stood a vat of water with a small rosary sunken to the bottom of it. In her hands, Marion held a leather-bound tome, which I had expected to contain a number of black magic spells, but which had, in fact, proven to be nothing but a book of Christian prayers and other such primitive mumbo jumbo.

“A method to prevent transubstantiation,” Aramis had read out from another volume. “Let’s see. I…” he bit his lips and then recited with his eyes closed.

_Accipite et bibite ex eo omnes:_  
_Hic est enim calix Sanguinis mei novi et aeterni testamenti,_  
_qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum._  
_Hoc facite in meam commemorationem._

“The _Eucharist_?” I grimaced as if the word itself left an unsavory taste on my lips. “And here I was expecting diabolical magic. Dark arts! But no - they used _Jesus_ to kill her.”

“Filthy inquisitors,” Marion shivered and pulled her cloak tighter around her form.

Aramis tossed the book to the floor, as if it had burned his hand. “Let’s burn all their papers.”

“Hell, let’s burn down the entire house,” I suggested. After all, you could not just leave four bodies in a house in the middle of Paris and expect no one to notice. This wasn’t the dark ages anymore, sadly.

***

Luckily for Paris, it had not been a windy night. Luckily for us, our temporary domicile had been on the opposite side of the Seine, close to Les Halles. We had returned there having escorted Marion to her own lodgings and bid her good night.

“Do you regret me not giving you some alone time with Marion?” Aramis sniped as he ascended the stairs to our shared room, past a very wakeful Grimley who sniffed us up and down like a bloodhound and then disappeared, having handed me a hot towel to wipe my hands.

“Don’t start that,” I teased. “I don’t for a moment believe that you think I have my sights on your latest mistress.”

“You gave her your damned hanky. In some circles that’s an open invitation to your bed.”

“I believe you were always much more at home in those circles than I was,” I brushed him off. “You are just being surly because you’re embarrassed that those hunters are using your pal Jesus to put supernaturals to death.”

“You don’t know me!” he veered towards me with calculated rage, but was felled by the ridiculousness of his own words and we found ourselves laughing and clutching at each other while our bodies shook.

At last, he drew away from me, catching his breath and walked over to the small dresser, as if to busy himself with mundane chores. The slope of his shoulders was uncertain. I wondered whether being back here, in Paris, had not weighed as heavily and bittersweetly on his memory as it did on mine.

“Hey kitten,” I pressed myself along Aramis’ back, my hands caressing his flanks, dipping down to grasp his hips and pull him even closer.

“Something you want that the Grigori couldn’t get you?” he murmured, voice full of hidden smiles, a soft purr in his throat as he leaned back against me, hand grasping for the evidence of my arousal and finding it too easily.

I loosened my cravat with one hand while my other held him across his chest pressed against me. My mouth traveled up the ligaments of his neck and sucked on his earlobe.

“Fancy a game?” I whispered and pulled the silk of my cravat tightly over his eyelids.

“Always,” his body vibrated against mine with laughter and anticipation. 

I unbuckled his belt and pulled it off his waist, letting his sword fall to the floor. “You won’t be needing that,” I explained, breathing into the back of his neck. “Aramis,” his name scalded my lips as I pressed them against his jaw, until I finally claimed his mouth with mine. He turned his head, leaning into the kiss, leaving the blindfold in place like the good kitten that he was. “You’re beautiful,” I said. These words, they never seemed to lose meaning.

“I’m yours,” he breathed against my lips.

“You are..,” I used his belt to bind his hands behind him, affixing his body to the supporting beam in the middle of the room. “Mine.”

“I knew you were going to do this, as soon as I realized this place had exposed beams,” he announced, lips set into a saucy smirk.

“Did you?” I positioned myself in front of him, chest to chest, my pelvis flush with his, and admired my handiwork. I let my fingers trace the contours of his face and dip into that soft hollow of his neck, before proceeding to unbutton his double-breasted military tailcoat. “Well then, you deserve some kind of a reward for being such a clever kitty.” I could see his creamy, white skin peeking out through the opened collar of his ruffled shirt. I let my fingers linger there, at his neckline, before proceeding to unbutton him down the middle. “You know something I hate even more than these incredibly tight breeches, Aramis?”

“Epaulets?”

“No. Too many damned buttons.”

He laughed and strained against his bonds to lean towards me. “My impatient, ancient Greekling. You have to work _harder_ ,” he thrust his hips forward against mine, “to get what you want.”

“Were buttons on these damn cuffs really necessary?”

“Vestigial godling doesn’t approve of change,” he teased me. “Poor old man.”

I tore open his shirt, leaving the remaining buttons to scatter to the floor, and let it hang open around his frame along with the coat.“Did you also know I was going to do _that_ , clever diablik?”

A tremor ran down his body and I could see his cock strain against the restrictive material of his trousers. I let my hand rest against the growing bulge, not touching any other part of him, until his body tried to sway towards me again. “Please,” he capitulated and sank back against the wooden beam, and I could not help but dissolve into a complacent grin. He would not be able to see it, but he could feel the reassuring squeeze of my fingers against his sack.

“You’re wild, kitten,” I whispered placing soft kisses along his clavicles, as my fingers fumbled with the fine wool of his breeches, until they too capitulated and slid to the floor, leaving his legs bare. “Maybe I should get you a collar.”

His breath caught in his throat and only the softest moan that escaped his lips told me he was ready. He truly was mine for the taking. Flushed, gorgeous, and just as dangerous as ever. My lips slid down his breastbone, where his heart palpitated in anticipation. A hot breath exhaled against one nipple, gratified to see it harden before I even touched it.

“Don’t,” he whimpered, his words half-pleading and half-dreading. My tongue snuck out and drew a lazy, wet swipe across the pink, hardening nub. “Ah!” he jolted into me.

“Oh no, is that the sensitive one?” I snickered into his warm flesh and moved my hand to the other one. “Or this one?” I inquired, pressing my fingers around the sensitive flesh, letting my thumb flick back and forth against it. He bit his lower lip to stifle a moan that still escaped through his nostrils. Below his waist, his cock angrily poked against my chest, as I lowered myself to my knees. 

“You tease,” he accused me from above, his head rolling against the beam.

“Me? Never.”

I let my fingers continue to toy with his nipples while my mouth trailed lower. I kissed the tight outline of his lower abs, avoiding his cock which threatened to leave streaks on me at the smallest provocation. I kissed the dark pleasure trail that disappeared into the coarse curls of his groin. I let my nails traverse the sharp bones of his hips, took his entire sack into my mouth and moaned with undisguised pleasure, and then let it rest heavily against the palm of my hand, while my mouth trailed back up the other side of his exposed torso.

“Kitten, you’re bristling,” I taunted him and he opened his mouth, flashing the sharp points of his fangs at me. Both my hands braced against his heaving chest, keeping him in place, while I hovered just out of his reach. And then my fingers pressed around both of his nipples, pinching them and rolling them between my thumb and index finger. His breath quickened and he made a keening sound that trickled like honey over my earlobes. “I love hearing you moan, angel.”

My mouth pressed to one of the nubs again, my tongue flicking against it like a whip.

“Stop! Have mercy,” he panted.

“Do you really want me to stop?” I asked, drawing lazy circles around the berry-red nub with my tongue.

“More… I need more…”

“What do you want, Aramis? Stop or more?”

He roared like a tiger and bucked against me. I sucked the nub into my mouth, my teeth chewing and pulling on it, while above me Aramis dissolved into a torrential outpouring of obscenities in three different languages.

“I’ve always wondered if I can make you get off just like this,” I whispered, one hand pressed against his upper back to hold him against my mouth, while the other groped for the perfect globes of his exposed ass. The berry in my mouth was beginning to bruise, so I moved over to the other one, taking my time kissing and licking it into full hardness.

“I can’t… I can’t,” he muttered incoherently, tossing his head back.

“Don’t sell yourself short, kitten.” I smiled against his heated flesh and bit into the tight muscle of his chest. “I believe in you.”

I let my fingers dip into the groove between his cheeks, pressing against the rim of his tight orifice. His red, swollen cock stabbed into me with renewed insistence. But I had no plans to breach him. I merely let my fingers rest against the sensitive skin there, while it puckered and trembled under my touch. He did not know where to go anymore, his cock propelling him forward, while another part of him wanted to thrust back against my fingers. In the meantime, I resumed my assault on his abused nipples with my lips and tongue.

“You filthy bastard!” he swore, body vibrating like a spring against me.

“I am that,” I concurred, loving the way he looked. So disheveled, so desperate to be taken.

“I hate you!” he lied through his teeth, as my finger continued to circle his entrance, resting against it but not breaching him.

“Do you, my love?”

“No!”

I laughed and took pity on him, pressing my wrist against his lips, where the sharp points of his fangs still glowed against the crimson skin. His teeth tore through my flesh and tendons with another wild half-moan, half-snarl. I shoved my wrist into his mouth, loving the way he used it almost as a gag, while his fangs tore into me, and then I lowered my head back to his chest and clamped my teeth around his nipple again, flicking my tongue back and forth against the swollen nub.

“Come on, lover,” I whispered. “Give it to me.” I had my mouth pressed to one and my free hand to the other one. His cock dripped, pressed against my waistcoat. Grimley was going to have to clean that one. My own cock strained maddeningly inside my breeches. But I would watch him fall apart first before taking care of my own needs. Another flick of my tongue, another tug of my teeth, and he painted the waistcoat and his own abdomen with thick, creamy streaks. “What a good boy you are,” I praised him, pulling my wrist out of his mouth. 

He panted against me, flushed, open-mouthed, streaked with my blood and his own seed.

“You’re a monster,” he declared, sinking against his restraints.

“Mmmm…” I ran my hands down his flanks, along his hips, and to his thighs that were still vibrating like a warhorse. “I am… a very…” I picked up his thighs and spread them in midair. “A very… bad… man.” I scooped up his seed from his damp abdomen and used it in lieu of oil before I thrust myself into the waiting tightness of his channel. “Indeed.” It was a good thing he was what he was and not what he appeared because a mere human would have sustained some serious injuries getting fucked in such precarious circumstances.

His body arched like a bow suspended there between the beam and my cock while I slammed into him.

“Take off the blindfold,” he said, and I pulled the silk off, while burying myself in him to the hilt. “Beast,” he mouthed at me, as I slammed up into him, my fingers leaving imprints on his magnificent ass while I clasped him in my grasp.

“I love you,” I mouthed back, no longer trusting myself to have a speaking voice. His legs wrapped around my waist, I propped him up against the beam, and let my own orgasm wash over me like a beautiful, cresting wave.

***

He had carried me to bed and thrown me into the pillows. He was asleep now, with one leg thrown over mine and his mouth at my neck. I was holding his wrist in a firm grip, and he was holding a fistful of my hair.

Everything had happened so fast. Less than two months ago, I had torn him back into life. Last month, I had introduced him to Marion. I had never spoken of her before we arrived in Ghent, it had never seemed important. Only now did I realise how much I had not told Athos.

I had not told him about the night when Marion and I hunted down a band of men who had continued the legacy of M. Colbert. It was he who had sent hunters after me and Porthos in 1665, on Marie’s request, and it was he who had left instructions about killing the likes of us.

I had not told him of the men who lived and acted in darkness. The men who knew of our existence and sought to destroy us. When Marion had brought me back from the dead, it was not because she wanted me for her lover. She and I had spent the last twenty years hunting down the men who hunted us. We lived in shadows. We moved like shadows. We were faster, we were better at finding them than they were at finding us. We hid and we stalked. We were _predators_.

But then, they had a brainwave.

Those stolid goons, bloodhounds without imagination and without finesse, who stalked us clumsily and who ran headlong into death, ever since Colbert’s men had followed me into the grotto of Locmaria one hundred and fifty years ago and were felled by the fist of a Titan – those men had found a way to trace us. They followed the words and the tracks of the poets, whose heads were full of stories of Ondines marrying human men in order to gain a soul. Poets who fancied themselves knight Huldebrand, who fancied themselves the King of Albany. Who fancied themselves adored and desired by water sprites, believing a nymph’s existence to lack hope and purpose unless a human took her for his wife.

For the first time in centuries, the words Marie had spoken in my bed after she’d rescued me from the sea came back to me: “ _Human men have the impudence to claim that they hold the key to immortality. And that the path thereto leads through their crotch._ ”

Indeed, the poets had great faith in the power of their crotches. It was time to show them that the pox was not the worst thing that could befall them.

But first, we had to rid France of men who hunted nymphs for sport, and erase Colbert’s legacy from human memory.


	3. Adonaïs

**London, February 1820**

_A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:_  
_Its loveliness increases; it will never_  
_Pass into nothingness; but still will keep_  
_A bower quiet for us, and a sleep_  
_Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing._

“Is he on to you, flittermouse?” I raised my eyes from reciting the tawdry drivel from our dear friend John Keats.

“Was that iambic pentameter?” Aramis asked, not lifting his eye out of the local newspaper.

“Shakespeare,” I sighed, “now _that_ was iambic pentameter.”

“You killed Shakespeare.”

“Now, that’s just unfair, Aramis!” I threw a betrayed look his way. It wasn’t my fault the human Bard’s liver wasn’t up to par to compete with my Olympian innards. I never asked him to go glass for glass with me.

My beloved’s eyes caressed the curve of my leg, where I sprawled in the sedan chair. “What else does Keats write?” he purred, twirling a quill between his fingers.

I scanned the poem with my eyes, “Aha! He _does_ have you figured out, Aramis.”

_And such too is the grandeur of the dooms_  
_We have imagined for the mighty dead;_  
_All lovely tales that we have heard or read:_  
_An endless fountain of immortal drink,_  
_Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink._

“And how do you know that’s not about _you_ , hmmm, my fine sir?”

“I am quite certain I am not his type,” I shrugged, “What with not being Miss Fanny Brawne, or alike to her in any way.” I ventured another look at him across the room, my mind mulling over how far I wanted to take the teasing. “You, my friend, might give her some competition.” 

“She’s not the one he wrote his latest Ode to, my love. The Ode on a _Grecian_ Urn, was it? My dear Komis Vrontis.”

Komis Athos Vrontis had been the name I found on my new passport after I had told Grimley I could not stomach my assumed Prussianness in practice or in name any longer. It was less ridiculous than Graf von Kyrius, but it could not have been more blatant had it been written in ambrosia.

“Really, Grimley? Count Athos Thunderson?” I had snickered.

“Sir has always excelled in hiding in plain sight,” my guardian shrugged with great complacency. “Besides, no one in England will understand the significance of the name _Vrontis_ , and sir wanted to embrace his roots again.”

“It is no worse than that time you went around calling yourself Athanasios the Athonite,” my beloved whispered then, leaning over my shoulder to beam down upon my new (or rather old) identity. 

If his joy at my discomfiture had been brief, it was only because Grimley had presented him with his own papers, with a rather dour physiognomy.

“Master Aramis, I was unable to find you a more suitable pseudonym, since I believe the medical profession is exceptionally suitable to your tastes. Especially the tender art of phlebotomy.”

“Pig,” Aramis snarled and I drew him closer, soothing my hand along his flank.

“I was, however, able to give you a Christian name. Well, perhaps not so very Christian, still, I believe Kyrios will agree it is quite fitting.” With a merciless smirk, the domestic barbarian left Aramis holding his new papers, which proclaimed him to be “Dr. Antinous Flitterbatt.”

Back in London, I frowned at the thought of young Master Keats. _Endymion_ may have been critically panned and all but lost to obscurity. The Ode to the damned Grecian Urn, on the other hand, was making the circles in polite society, indeed. Grimley himself gleefully recited it at dinner with such great dramatic declamation that it had really forced me to lob a leg of chicken right at his budding thespian head.

_When old age shall this generation waste,_  
_Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe_  
_Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,_  
_"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all_  
_Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”_

Aramis recited the latest and laughed, his teeth mocking and beckoning me from where he was seated. “He knows too much, old man,” he added. “Plus, he hangs about with those tinkerers of the occult. Lord Byron and his physician friend, Polidori.”

“Don’t forget Percy Shelley,” I shuddered. “What is it with these damned Romantics? You know, I knew Homer... _No_ , not like that, don’t look at me that way!”

“How shall I look upon you, my love?” Aramis stalked across the room and moved my legs over to sit by my side, his elbow leaning coyly against my shin. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

“Stop that.”

“Thou art more lovely and more temperate… No, you really aren’t temperate at all, are you?”

“Why haven’t you eaten him yet?”

“Keats?”

“Yes. Don’t change the subject.”

His hand ran lazily from my ankle to my knee and hovered there, drawing precise circles with the nail of his index finger.

“They’re popular,” Aramis shrugged. “And at home. Eating Keats or Shelley in their native land seems brazen, even for us.”

“We came here to ascertain whether they _know_. I think we can be certain they do indeed know too much, even if they don’t know the whole truth.”

We had spent five years ridding France of the scourge of the hunters of the supernatural. Their networks ran deeper than we had means of ferreting out in a short time. Besides, to painstakingly cover up their deaths took considerable planning. We could not afford to start a new fire in Paris every other night of the week; eventually, one would think someone might notice. And we could not very well trust our luck to a localized breakout of the plague. We left no stone unturned and no body unburied. But, having at last dispatched with Colbert’s legacy, we could finally turn our vengeful eyes upon other men who warranted our suspicion: these so-called poets.

“He’s very pale,” I went on, “Very likely quite sickly. You’ve gotten very good at aiming your shadow _just_ so.”

“My bloodthirsty Olympian,” Aramis laughed and leaned over me, brushing my lips with his. “Is it his poetry you hate so much? Or something else?”

“His chin,” I whispered, tracing Aramis’ own chin with my thumb, “It’s very weak. I do not like the cut of it.”

“ _An endless fountain of immortal drink_ , did he really write?” Aramis pressed his body into mine and I wrapped my legs around his hips, holding him closer while my lips now traced the same path first trod by my thumb.

“He did.”

“That is insupportable.”

“I agree.” My tongue rested against the pulsepoint beneath the cut of his jaw. His body was warm against mine, filled to the brim with my own blood which he had taken in lieu of breaking fast.

“I think I shall invite Mister Keats for a ride in Hyde Park,” Aramis whispered into my opened lips. “I hear it is supposed to be an exceptionally sunny day tomorrow.”

I sucked his tongue into my mouth and closed my eyes. London, this time around, was a much more pleasant experience than the last few times I had visited it. Seven months at Señor Perez’s tavern notwithstanding.

***

**London, August 1821**

“Good afternoon, sirs.” Mr Grimley had insinuated himself into the drawing room and inclined his head in an imitation of deference. “Are sirs at home?”

“To whom?” Athos, who lay sprawled in a chair with a pointer by his feet, twirling a tumbler between his long fingers with the lazy languor befitting a gentleman of independent means, barely raised his eyes to the looming Grigori.

Mr Grimley slunk across the Persian carpet and stood in the patch of sunlight that poured in through the tall library windows. He held out the silver tray that I swore I would one day break over his perfectly coiffed and slick head, and Athos picked up the proffered visiting card.

“Mademoiselle d’Elorme.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “What do you think, my dear doctor, are we at home?”

I steepled my fingers over the papers I was studying and looked the God of Discord up and down. He shifted in his chair and smirked. “Don’t keep the lady waiting, Grimley,” I said coldly.

He bowed with as much respect as he could squeeze out of his rigid frame and Olympian soul and went to fetch the fairy. Athos stood and strode over to me, smiling as he walked.

“Marion is going to be very proud of you, chyortik,” he purred as he seated himself on my desk. “You have been slaving away at the drivel like a good little scholar.” He kissed me on top of the head, but I resisted.

“They know things, Athos.” My eyes trailed along the line of his thigh, to where the tails of his coat had folded back and revealed the curve of his hip. “It won’t be before long that a new generation of hunters will pick up the scent again.” Athos’ mouth curled in disdain, but I forestalled his objections. “Don’t sneer, count. You saw what they did with witches: they wrote books on how to find them, how to identify them, and then they murdered them. They know how to kill my kind. And they certainly know how to destroy the old gods. You weren’t there, Athos. You didn’t see how the plebs rose up to murder their kings. If humans start to believe in our existence, they will rise up again to murder us.”

“You worry too much, Aramis.” Athos reached out and pulled out a well-read copy of New Monthly Magazine from the stack and leafed through it. “Look, Polidori acknowledged that the revenant lives in the end. Even though he called him a _vampyre_ ,” he snorted.

The door opened again, and Marion entered, announced by a grim-looking Grimley. She wore a light muslin dress and an elegant bonnet, and was accompanied by a creature that I took for a lutin.

“Mademoiselle d’Elorme!” Athos beamed at her, sliding off my desk to greet her. He took both her gloved hands in his and kissed them. “It is always a pleasure to see you. Grimley, tea.”

“Very well, sir.” Grimley bowed like a well-oiled automaton. “Does sir desire anything else? Apart from the obvious.”

“He is most amusing,” Marion said, after I, too, had greeted her. I rolled my eyes and Athos smiled fondly. “You must be very attached to him.”

“He has his uses,” I mumbled, leading her to a chair. She sat gracefully, leaned back and crossed her ankles daintily, looking ethereal like air itself. Marion had changed since the night when I had been guillotined. Back then, there had been cracks in the gauze-like exterior, and the sharp edges of her steel core had poked through like bones of a starving human poke through skin. Now, she was the radiant picture of loveliness, with luminous lynx eyes and translucent skin. Her teeth, which she revealed in a smile, were as sharp as ever.

“I’ve got something for you,” she said. A gesture of her hand, and the lutin-like creature approached and bowed. “I believe you never had much luck with servants, Aramis.”

Athos and I exchanged a look. “Don’t eat the servant,” he mouthed at me, and warmth pooled into my loins.

“Do you two need a moment?” Marion glanced from me to Athos and back to me. “Have this one. He will be satisfactory.”

The creature bowed again, without a word. When he straightened up and faced me, there was a glint in his eyes that made me reassess him. I had taken him for one of Marion’s familiars, more beast than being, despite its humanoid form. But he was something more than a member of a dying race. His eyes were shrewd, and his face and posture, albeit respectful, were proud. It was an ageless face, clean-shaven and clear-cut, and they were ageless eyes.

“What’s your name?” I addressed my new faithful retainer.

“Bartleby, sir. At your service.”

“Are you Irish?”

A glint behind those shrewd eyes. “To be sure, to be sure.”

I turned to Marion. “A leprechaun?”

“Who better?” She shrugged. “Doesn’t your Grigori always pester you about money? Bartleby will lead you to a pot of gold.”

“Good,” I said. “The money Porthos had left us has run out, and we can’t support our lifestyle by my consultation fees alone. I’m not quite the King’s physician yet.”

“In that case, I can be of use to you, sir,” Bartleby said. “If the conditions are right.”

“Conditions?” Athos gazed at the new help in astonishment. “What do you mean by conditions, Bartleby?”

“We’ll see about that,” the leprechaun replied. He turned to me. “If Dr Flitterbatt has no objections, I am ready to enter into his employment.”

Athos and I exchanged a look. Another insolent domestic, just what we needed. But Marion’s bright eyes glittered like stars from beneath the shade of her bonnet, and Marion had never yet given me reason to doubt her. If she presented me with a leprechaun, I would accept the gift graciously.

“Thank you, my dear,” I said and pressed her hand to my lips. “I’m happy to accept.”

“Good,” she said simply. 

“Bartleby,” I addressed my new acquisition. “Make yourself useful. Grimley will show you your room and the hats that need brushing.”

The leprechaun departed without another word, and Marion spoke again: “Now, gentlemen – to business. You went to the inquest?”

“Natural death,” Athos said. “The coroner’s verdict – and I quote – was: ‘he had departed this Life in a natural way by the visitation of God’.”

“No mysterious haemorrhaging? No coughing up of blood?” Marion said. “I’m impressed. I believed you too attached to your modus operandi to change it.”

I wrinkled my nose. “You are mistaken, Marion. The modus operandi is by no means set in stone.”

In truth, I had not witnessed a man dying from a drink that didn’t agree with him since that memorable day in 1661 when the poor Franciscan monk departed in my presence in the best room at the inn called the Beau Paon. He had taken a state secret to his grave, and he had bequeathed me a bundle of papers and a ring to bind them all: all Jesuits scattered in majestic strongholds across the four corners of the globe.

The poor Franciscan monk had not died by prussic acid. But then – neither had John William Polidori, whose death was the sad result of a melancholy spirit weighed down by gambling debts and gloom. Nothing could be more innocent and natural.

“That will teach him, educating the world about revenants. Stripping strigoikind of its cultural roots. Making the revenant _English_. Lord Ruthven, hah!”

Athos shook his head despondently. “We should have stopped them before they rose to fame,” he said. “In Switzerland. They were all there, talking about us as if-”

“As if we were puppets that they can take out to play whenever they want and shove us back into the darkness of oblivion when they got bored,” Marion interjected. “Quaint creatures of the night, so romantic, pah! They have been stirring up much unrest on the Continent, luring those, who should be asleep in the shadows, out into the world, and seeding doubt among humans, who will take up arms against us again if we don’t do anything to stop belief from spreading.”

“I would have never expected you to be so keen on keeping the peace, Madame,” the God of Discord smirked.

“Oh, peace! I don’t care about peace. It’s not desire for peace if I don't want to end up being hunted by a bunch of lumbering goons who use gormless poets as bloodhounds.” She smiled, displaying her pearly teeth to advantage. “À propos of peace, count: I commend you on your skill and circumspection in starting the Greek War. I had believed the Achaeans quite subjugated under the Ottoman rule, but you have proved otherwise.”

Athos bowed gracefully, accepting the praise with a smile. In spring, the God of Discord and I had spent several weeks in Greece, and we have witnessed the Bishop Germanos of Patras raise the revolutionary flag at the Monastery of Agia Lavra. Athos had been tempted to join the uprising, but I soon convinced him otherwise. “Have you _seen_ what your Hellenic heroes are wearing in battle these days?” I’d pointed out, my fingers clenched in his fashionably short hair and my teeth clasped to his throat. “I will not let you grow a bushy moustache like d’Artagnan, Athos. If I have to tie you to the bed for months and have Grimley feed you broth, so be it. And don’t even _think_ of growing a mullet.” He gasped out a strangled laugh, and I knew I had won. Those Greek frocks used to look much more fetching in Athos’ time than they did now when they shrouded the warlords and voivods of modern Greece.

No, joining the Greek army had not been a viable option. Planning and orchestrating the rebellion as members of the wealthy Greek exile community in England had been much more appealing.

“The British are still reluctant to go to war,” Athos ground his teeth. “Wellington is a staunch supporter of the Ottoman territorial integrity.”

“He fears what will happen if the Ottoman Empire collapses,” I said. “Russia would fill the power vacuum, and do we really want the Tsar to rule over Asia Minor?”

“Whose side are you on, Aramis?” my lover asked me with flashing eyes.

“Yours. Always.”

“Lord Byron is a supporter of the Hellenic cause,” Marion said with a cruel little smile.

Athos snorted. “That dick! I want nothing to do with him, regardless how much he fancies himself an ally.”

“Wait a moment.” I touched Athos’ wrist lightly. “There may be a way to use him.” I smiled at him. “In a manner that will not be detrimental to your honour, my love.”

***

**Ligurian Sea, July 1822**

“Why did you name your schooner _Il calamaro stanco_?” Aramis asked, looking overboard with a sense of dread. “It does not give me a lot of confidence in its seaworthiness.” In truth, I was amazed he had taken me up on the offer of joining me for a pleasure cruise around the Gulf of Spezia, given his considerable distrust of the sea. But his love of his newly minted God of Discord must have sustained him. 

“The Tired Squid,” Athos tittered and raised the glass of my favorite Nero d’Avola vintage to his lips. “Porthos, you never cease to amuse me.”

“Yeah, well, you should have seen me when I bought this boat. I was exhausted from pleasuring five insatiable Namibian priestesses. Trust me, the squid was tired.”

“Sounds like Africa has been good to you,” my cousin mused. “We’re glad you could find the time to join us for a spell.”

“I’m surprised you invited me. After what I saw at Waterloo, I thought you’d be down for the count for the next thirty years or so.” I winked at Aramis. “Down for the count, eh?”

“Stop,” the revenant wrinkled his dainty nose.  
I stopped, but grudgingly. Observing them together had always been a secret joy of mine, so I allowed a companionable silence to reign aboard the Squid.

Something paled in the distance, catching my eye along the waves. “What ho, another vessel!” I exclaimed taking out my spyglass and aiming it in the direction of the small sail. “Speaking of silly names, Aramis, what kind of a wanker names his sailing boat _Don Juan_?”

“Lord Byron,” Athos responded with a shudder of visible disgust.

“It’s Shelley’s boat,” Aramis smiled, “but Byron insisted on marking it, like a dog with his piss.”

“Shelley!” I grimaced. “Isn’t he that bloke who insists on constantly invoking the muses in his poetry? My friend Saint-Georges always said that only hacks need to invoke muses. A true genius carries his muse within,” I repeated my departed friend’s words with profound reverence.

“Saint Georges,” Athos narrowed his eyes, “That’s your Republican general friend, isn’t it?”

“My _composer_ friend,” I corrected heatedly and cast a look at Aramis to see whether he had betrayed me in the throes of disgustingness.

“Homer used to invoke the Musai,” Athos shrugged, looking vaguely bored and gazing at the poet’s sailing boat through the glass of his empty bottle.

“Oh _Homer_!” Aramis suddenly became very animated. “Your cousin _knew_ him, you see, Porthos.”

“Oh, kitten,” Athos shook his head and set the empty bottle aside.

“Aramis, be reasonable,” I laughed. “I’ve met Homer, and I assure you, he was not at all your husband’s type.” The Immortal Marrieds exchanged one of their looks and I raised my eyebrow. “What?”

“This is the first time you’ve given us any indication how long you’ve been kicking about, Porthos,” my cousin explained.

“Oh, you know me,” I shrugged. “I try not to get fixated on details. Age, I always say, is just a number.” They exchanged another look, no doubt incapable of controverting my brilliant insight.

“Shelley is much prettier than Homer was,” Athos grinned, showing Aramis the top row of his perfectly white teeth, and I could have sworn I could see the mantle of Discord materialize and shimmer in the Ligurian sunlight.

“Well, you’re welcome to join his harem,” Aramis tried to proclaim with disdain, but his moment of indignation was ruined by a wave that craned my schooner precariously to one side. “Oh, your horrid gods,” the revenant whispered, blanching, his fingers clutching at Athos’ sleeve. My cousin laughed and quickly wrapped his arms around his beloved, no doubt for both moral and physical support. 

Without missing a beat, Athos continued to regale me with tales of Shelley and Byron and their rather enlightened, if you will, approach to love and friendship. My friends had followed the poets from England to Italy, successfully ingratiating themselves into their artistic circle as the exiled Greek Count Vrontis and his traveling companion Dr. Flitterbatt. 

“That Byron is a rare gem of a pompous cock,” Athos was telling me, with one arm around Aramis’ middle. “But thankfully, he has sailed on, no doubt to deface timeless works of art and historical monuments elsewhere. He really prides himself on leaving his mark for posterity.” I could tell it pained my cousin to speak of this barbarism, since for a moment his face shared the same greenish hue as the visage of Aramis. 

“Ugh,” the pretend doctor almost choked, “I see he told you about his visit to Chillon. He does go on about his adventures as if he is the first man to ever leave his homeland.”

“That appalling, self-important _twat_ ,” Athos reached for another bottle of the Nero d’Avola and refilled all our glasses. 

“In truth,” Aramis whispered to me as an aside, “he rather reminds me of d'Artagnan.”

“As for that fop, Percy Shelley,” Athos continued unawares, “he’s taken up residence in Lerici, with the woman he calls his wife, and the woman she calls her sister. Both saucy minxes, if you ask me, and quite possibly more talented than any of the men they are forced to associate with.”

“Claire Clairmont is _particularly_ your type, Athos,” Aramis prodded rallying his inner strength against the elements. I found all this adorable, considering he was really in no condition to put up much of a struggle at all, while the wind tossed the schooner in the opposite direction.

“The wind is picking up,” I remarked.

“You don’t say,” Aramis scowled. Athos, in the meantime, had been looking steadily in the direction of the terribly named _Don Juan_. “Can’t you have a talk with your family?” Aramis mumbled in exasperation. “Which one of you is most closely related to the Anemoi?”

“Oh, I don’t know, my Hyacinthus - you seem to have gotten rather close with them yourself,” the God of Discord spoke and ran his fingers through our nauseated friend’s hair.

“Say, Athos,” under his attention, the kitten mewled, “why don't you have the ability to turn into an animal like the rest of your family? Could be useful.”

“I've only recently become a full god, Aramis,” my cousin replied, seemingly unmoved. “Why? Is there, perhaps, some fetish you have not shared with me yet?”

“You would make a _magnificent_ beast of burden,” Aramis sighed and I gagged.

“You would know, flittermouse,” Athos laughed. “No one alive or dead has ridden me for more miles.”

“Zeus, take my ears!” I exclaimed. 

“Poor Porthos,” Athos whispered into his beloved’s hair, still cradling him in his arms throughout their peculiar exchange. “And poor chyortik.”

“I never should have allowed you to talk me into this so-called _pleasure_ cruise,” Aramis buried his face in Athos’ neck, no longer caring if the Anemoi and all the sea nymphs bore witness to his abject misery.

“In a few minutes, my love, I daresay you will change your mind,” Athos replied with a gleam in his eye that simultaneously troubled yet excited me. He lifted his eyes towards the heavens and they glowed with a sinister darkness. “Come, wingèd cousins. Bring me Mister Shelley.”

“What are you doing?” I inquired, rising up to make the necessary adjustments to the sails as the winds picked up all around us.

“I have faith in your Squid, Porthos,” Athos laughed and looked over Aramis’ head, “that though it may be tired, it may yet prove to be a veritable battle ship. Now, turn it starboard.”

“If I do that, we’ll collide with the _Don Juan_.”

“That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?” Athos smiled. “You know, I'm afraid our friend Percy is not a very experienced navigator. At that angle, we’d be sure to breach their hull.”

“He should have known better than to set out in weather like this,” I shook my head, thinking of Fortune’s Wheel and how ruthlessly it was about to turn against the fair-faced British poet. “And it really was tactless of them to put the name on the mainsail.”

“Like the Commendatore, dragging Don Giovanni into Hell,” Aramis flashed his teeth in the gathering darkness of the storm, “So too will _Don Juan_ sink, dragged downwards by its own hubris.” 

“I told you,” Athos pressed an open mouthed kiss against Aramis’ temple, “you would not regret this outing.”

“That will teach those amateurs to mess with powers far beyond their feeble comprehension,” Aramis sneered.

“Ave calamari!” I guffawed and turned the boat precisely as Athos had instructed. 

“Hang on, Aramis,” my cousin said, “I believe we’re about to make Mary Shelley a proper widow.”

I perked up my ears, but as if reading my mind, my two friends declared in one voice, “Don’t even think about it, Porthos!”

By the time the men's bodies had washed to shore, no one could be certain whether it was the storm or his own gloomy disposition which had sunk Shelley. The only thing everyone had agreed upon was that he was well and truly dead, struck down by the will of whatever God he may or may not have believed in. 

_Cor cordium_ , they had written upon his tombstone. The heart of hearts.

“Sentimental fools,” Athos would later say, standing over the symbolic grave in Rome. I vividly recall the way Aramis had wrapped his arms around his lover from behind, interlacing his fingers over Athos’ breastbone and whispering “My _cor cordium_ ” into his ear, as if it was a secret the Romantics had dared to steal from the two of them, like my cousin Prometheus had stolen fire from Olympus. Perhaps they did. 

As for the Tired Squid, she sailed quietly onwards, skirting the Ligurian coast, and further southerly, into the open Tyrrhenian Sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This picture of a Greek hero of the War of Independence illustrates why Aramis refused to join:  
>    
> 


	4. The Quality of Mercy

**Genoa, November 1822**

Boreas’ icy fingers reached into the depth of the alleys, like claws of death stabbing through human ribcage to freeze the heart. In the darkness, Athos’ face glowed under the brim of his hat: divine light flickered around him, divine power solidified around him in the same way that his breath did when the North Wind’s pinions brushed over his mouth.

Under the touch of my gaze, Athos turned his head and locked his eyes with mine. They gleamed with Olympian fire, and around him, the mantle of Discord billowed like the waves of the angry ocean.

The Hunts had arrived in Genoa.

Like a pack of scavengers, they had pursued Byron across the Continent, gorging on the carrion that rotted under his entourage’s table. Did they know, the Hunts, that they hauled hunters in their tow?

Boreas gushed into the fissures between the houses. He howled with its non-existent mouth and rattled its non-existent teeth. In the vortex at the tip of his wings, a pocket of air burst and released the scent of my prey. Even as my body glided over the cobblestones, my senses hung above me in the air, and I saw the pursued pursuers, but not with my eyes. I sensed them move through space, as if the warmth of their bodies, the sound of their steps were a corporeal entity.

Athos’ hand on my arm. “Where to, Aramis?” the God of Discord mouthed, and I pulled him with me.

Deeper and deeper into the black-blue abyss, like divers encroaching on Poseidon’s realm. Shadows stretched out their tentacles, but we slipped through them and pushed our way through the miasma of the harbour streets. Salt hung in the air and coated our skin and tongues.

Prince Schilitzy and Comte d’Orsay. Greek, Russian, French, Dutch, Swiss – they were nationals of all those countries, and more. They had no family, and their names were smoke and ashes. They carried arms under their doublets that were designed to sever my head from my body. They carried matches to light a fire and immolate my remains then and there. For they knew that I would otherwise rise again, angrier and more powerful than before.

Did they know about Athos, too?

Would they banish my god to a cave under a mountain, where he’d share the fate of countless deities of yore? His powers drained, his mind gone, his existence a myth that did not survive outside of fairy-tales.

My fangs tingled and grazed my lip, and I tasted his blood. My body thrummed with the energy that he had poured into me before we set off to stalk the men who chased us.

The Count d’Orsey and the Prince Skilitzky had joined the Hunts, sycophants and beneficiaries of Byron, and they sang just enough praise and held themselves aloof just enough to make for attractive, yet inconspicuous companions. They knew what Byron did not: that his path led him to where the Old Ones dwelled.

Like d’Artagnan, Byron had the knack of stumbling nose-first into secrets that did not concern him. Like d’Artagnan, he was too blind to see what was in front of him. Like the Inquisitive Man in Krylov’s fable, he failed to notice the elephant in the museum. He groped for the truth, but all that his fumbling fingers found was the hem of Lady Veritas’ robes.

But the hunters, oh, the hunters! They were a different species of man entirely. They were not blinded by superstition, and their vision was not impaired by fanciful dreams of the occult. They were men of sharp mind and even sharper teeth. They were jackals, they were parasites, they rode on the backs of the Romantics who led them straight to the brink, where the world of humans dissolved in the world of shadows.

They looked into the abyss, and the abyss stared back with the eyes of seraphim.

The prey-shaped dents morphed in the miasma through which we glided. Like the brothers in the fairy-tale, Athos and I had arrived at a crossroads: for one of our prey had walked left, the other right.

My god and I exchanged a look. His eyes glinted, his lips parted, he shook his head. We would not separate. We would slay one of the men who hunted us, and then the other. We were not in a rush.

We had all the time in the world.

The streets of Genoa were so narrow that not more than one man could squeeze between the houses at a time. Boreas had taken out a flute to whistle a high-pitched tune as he wheezed through alleys as if through giant organ pipes.

Deeper and deeper into the Underworld, into Hades, into the lowest circle of Hell. Our boots soundless on the damp cobbles, for the Death we carried with us was not the shrieking, crashing, piercing death of the battlefield. It was the silent Death of divine judgement.

Our quarry slipped from the embrace of the night into the shelter of sacred ground. For a moment, I lost his scent, and then I knew: a chapel by the quay, where seamen prayed for their lost souls. We slithered from the shadows of the alley into the shadow of the Cross. Through the door, past a faded altar of St. Nicholas, patron saint of sailors and whores, and down, down the steps into the crypt, where the hunter stood with his silver bullets and blade.

I bit my lip until I tasted blood.

“Count Dorsey,” Athos said in his calm, vibrating voice. “Since, after running after one another so long, chance has at last brought us together, let us have a little conversation, if you please.”

The hunter’s eyes flashed from beneath the brim of his hat. He did not speak, for he knew: to talk to demons meant to follow its seductive call. Meant giving in to temptation.

“Sir,” Athos continued, “you are alone, and we are two, both of us well armed and more than well-versed in this kind of exercise. We will not murder you, for, despite what you and your brethren might think, we are no uncivilised brutes. If you will consent to duel with either of us, you will fall in a fair fight, like a nobleman. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is much preferable to being slaughtered like an animal.”

His gaze flickered from Athos to me and then back. He appeared to hesitate, but I knew better and was prepared: the moment his arm tensed, the moment he pulled the trigger, the moment the bullet whizzed through the air and crashed into the armour of Discord.

His blade was swift and razor-sharp. As I lunged at him, my sword and my teeth bared, he struck out with a powerful arm and a shower of drops hit my face. Holy water. Salty and oily on my skin, and where did that superstition come from? Reports of the revenants of the East clearly stated again and again that an upior, a strigoi would rise from his grave and ring the church bells at midday. And yet those asinine cretins had spread tales of how vampires feared sunlight and could not walk on sacred ground. “How,” I breathed into the hunter’s face, as I pinned him to the ground with my weight and my sword. “How do you think we leave the graveyards if we can’t walk across holy ground? Have you ever thought of that?” His pupils were black and the shadow of death descended upon him already. Yet with a last throe of the dying man, he swung his arm and rammed his misericorde into my side with all his might. It tore through my coat and doublet and clanged against my cuirass.

My fangs tore through his throat with ease and blood, spiced with rage and fear, spiced with power and virility, gushed into my throat. When I raised my head, I saw Athos kneel at the far corner of the crypt, where the light of the solitary torch did not penetrate. Scattered around him were white feathers.

“Why do these imbeciles find it so hard to understand that we know what armour is for?” I asked rhetorically, rising to my feet. I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped my mouth. “Athos?”

Kneeling before the altar of the Crucified, the God of Discord looked at me over his shoulder. “They weren’t after us, Aramis.”

“No?” I folded my handkerchief and put it back in my pocket. It was fringed with expensive Mechlin lace, Grimley would have to find a way to remove the blood stains. “Whom, then?”

“Them.” He moved and revealed the shape on the stones floor.

I walked over to my lover and put a hand on his shoulder. “A plucked swan?”

“Cycnus.”

I frowned. “Did Byron write about swans?”

“ _Place me on Sunium's marbled steep,_  
_Where nothing save the waves and I_  
_May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;_  
_There, swan-like, let me sing and die_ ,” Athos quoted from _Don Juan_.

I prodded the bird with the tip of my foot. “This one is beyond singing.”

“One of Byron’s damned followers must have found out about Cycnus and put the hunters on his trail.” Athos said.

“Well. It’s done now. Let’s throw the bodies into the sea and go find dear Prince Schilizzi before he throttles any innocent fowl.”

The giant bird at our feet stirred feebly. A wing tip brushed over my boot. His neck, his chest were pink and naked, the skin covered in bleeding scratches and wounds where he had been inexpertly plucked. Its wing was broken, and on the other side, a human arm stuck awkwardly from the bird corpus.

“He used to walk through the garden of Apollo.” There was great sadness in Athos’ voice, and I slipped my arm around his shoulder and pulled him closer. The armour of Discord had dematerialised again, and it was a man, not a god, who stood beside me, recounting the ancient Ligurian myth: “He leapt into the river Eridanos and was transformed into a swan. _Cycnus_.”

“Not him,” I objected. “His ancestor.”

Athos smiled sadly. “That’s not how it works, chyortik,” he said. “He is Cycnus and Cycnus is him. This is the essence of a creature of legends. Like your Holy Trinity, many are one.”

“We must kill him,” I said and sank to my knees beside the swan-man. “No point dragging it out.” I wrapped my hands around the curved neck. Its eyes snapped open: human eyes in the bird face, dilated behind the grey veil from behind which there was no escape. The bones of his neck were brittle. His beak opened to reveal human teeth, a human tongue, and a human voice tore from his throat: the long, mournful note of _carmen cygni_.

The bones cracked between my fingers. The last note trembled and died, the body shuddered. I let go of him and Athos pulled me back up. We stood side by side and watched it twitch and reassert itself: a human face appeared, with heavy brows and a slack mouth. A twisted neck. A human torso, covered in blood. Human groin, human legs, a human arm.

The other arm – a broken wing; feathers stirred by the breath of Boreas that blew over cold stones.

We did not hunt down Constantine Schilitzy that night. By the time the bodies of Dorsey and of Cycnus sank to the ground of the sea, pulled down by stones bound around their necks and their feet, Dorsey’s companion had vanished like fog under the rays of the morning sun. Athos and I never learned if he had got wind of us, or if he set out on a new trail to hunt down other unfortunates who were too old, too feeble or too stupid to survive under the new world order, anthropocracy. His name appeared on the list of passengers who boarded the _Hercules_ as part of Byron’s entourage when the poet set sails for Cephalonia.

But we did not know that until it was too late.

***

**Kefalonia, August 1823**

My vessel, Ο γιος χταπόδι, or Son of Octopus, was anchored in the Ionian Islands, off the coast of Kefalonia, when Mr Grimley stormed into my captain’s cabin and respectfully demanded that I tell him where, and I quote, his “idiots have buggered off to”. They had taken the Tired Squid out for a turn around the Heptanese earlier in the morning and I had been expecting them back any moment.

“It is imperative that I inform them of an event most foul,” the guardian informed me, with his usual penchant for dramatic flare.

“Have the Ottomans attacked the islands?”

“No, sir, a ship has come to port. A _Hercules_.” Grimley rolled his eyes, as if he’d never heard of a name more tacky for a vessel.

“I’m sure Athos will get over it. Other things have been named after his half-brother before, haven’t they? I had a monkey once named Hercules,” I offered, in my most reassuring tones.

“It is not the ship itself,” the Grigori went on, “but rather who was aboard.”

“Well? Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“Lord Byron,” he pronounced like the peal of doom.

For a moment, I could not help but think back to Paris, 1648, when the Grigori stood before us as Grimaud, brandishing a bloodied dagger. I cleared my throat.

“Still alive, is he?”

“It appears so, Master Porthos. He’s come to fight in the war.”

“Athos did mention he had Hellenistic tendencies,” I mumbled.

“Who?” Grimley and I turned as Aramis and Athos climbed aboard, their hair and clothes excessively wind-tossed, or so I was resolved to believe.

“George Gordon Byron, sirs,” the Grigori reported with a curt bow.

“The Devil himself puts him in our path!” Aramis hissed and bit his lips. “We left him to his fate in Italy, but he’s followed us here!” I was beginning to see what Aramis had been talking about when he said the British lord reminded him of our old friend d’Artagnan. “You know what I don’t understand?” the revenant went on, growing more enraged.

“What, beloved?”

“He’s short! Moreover, he has a distinct predisposition for fatness. He’s pale and effeminate. In his demeanor, he’s _shy_. And to top it all off, he has an obvious foot deformity. Now… How on _Earth_ did this man manage to become the reigning target of sexual obsession of the day!”

“And with both genders,” I offered. Evidently, that had been a gauche thing to say, because steam pooled out of Aramis’ nostrils.

“It _galls_ me!” the revenant declared.

“Yes, I can see that, Aramis,” Athos replied, ostensibly unmoved by his lover’s deeply emotional display. “It galls me too, a bit.” My cousin shrugged. Like most Greeks, he, for one, did not question destiny.

“What is he doing here!” Aramis exploded, at no one in particular.

“He intends to fight on the side of the Greek rebels.”

“That utter twat,” Athos’ face for a moment resembled a tragedian’s mask. “And how does he intend to do that? He has no military experience!”

“Perhaps he can bore the Turks to death with one of his lengthy narrative poems,” Grimley suggested.

“Oh, do shut up, Grimley,” Aramis whined, even though I personally found the comment hilariously on point.

“He’s wearing the dress and everything,” Grimley continued, pressing his hand to his heart, to indicate where it hurt. “Sir won’t even wear the dress himself.”

“That’s because sir’s husband won’t let him,” I added with a furtive chuckle, undaunted by Aramisian death glares.

“To be fair, it isn’t the dress I find ridiculous,” Athos objected with sudden ferocity, “it’s that you’re expected to wear foolish trousers underneath.”

“ _Oh_ ,” I shuddered, “Now that _is_ appalling.”

“He’s also wearing the trousers,” the Grigori chimed in. Then he rustled about his pockets and produced a thick-toothed ivory comb, which he extended towards his Kyrios.

“We never should have come back here,” Athos sighed, waving the grooming implement away. “It’s painful to walk among these lands and see to what ruin they have been brought. And now - Byron! It was bad enough he was dabbling in Hellenism and androphilia back home, as if it was just another aspect of the occult, but to see him _here_. In Hellas. My blood boils.”

It _was_ painful, not only for Athos, except that he’d always been better at expressing his displeasure than I was. For me, my malcontent most frequently manifested as hunger, or, less frequently, a desire to bludgeon someone. For Athos, well, let’s just say when we came to Athens and he beheld what had become of the Parthenon since the seventeenth century, he fell to his knees, and pronounced, “My sister’s Temple! I swear, Aramis, if I could still die of a broken heart, I would.” It was then that I had the distinct pleasure of watching Aramis slap him. Of course, then I had the distinct displeasure of having to make myself scarce so that they could _work things out_ on what was left of the Parthenon’s marbles.

“Aramis?” It appears I was not the only one to have sunken into a reverie. “Are you still with us?” Athos had asked.

“No, no, this is good. This is… yes. This is exactly how I thought we could use him, still back in London,” the revenant muttered. “This is wonderful! He’s playing right into our hands.”

“My darling, have you lost your mind due to sun exposure?” Athos asked, rising to place his hand on his lover’s forehead with growing tender concern.

Dr Flitterbatt laughed and pushed Athos’ hand away playfully. “No, Athos, can’t you see? He has no military experience! He has come to Greece to play War? Let’s join him, and take him to War!”

***

**Cape Sounion, October 1823**

There is a town near Athens, with a current population of about sixty thousand souls, called Vyronas. It is named after Lord Byron. That club-footed ape whom I helplessly watched carve his name into the ravaged and desecrated column in what was left of the Temple of Poseidon in Cape Sounion.

“Eat him, flittermouse,” I shuddered with rage.

“Not yet. We must wait for him to become a hero, before he can become a martyr.”

“I can’t bear it anymore, Aramis.” Indeed, I turned my back from the water, unable to watch as the little poet, with his tongue stuck out in deep concentration, continued to desecrate my homeland the way he had desecrated the walls of the château de Chillon. “You know, my mother served in a temple much like this one before I was born.”

Aramis’ lips brushed against my temple and I felt his fingers press my own. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pietro Gamba, Byron’s little Pierino, eyeing us with a mixture of worry and arousal. At least, in the company of Byron’s entourage, we had nothing to fear on _that_ account.

“Not much longer, my love, I promise,” he whispered into my ear, and a shiver of pleasure ran through my limbs and shot to my loins.

“What are you going to do with him?” I nodded in the direction of Byron’s young companion.

“We need him to live, don’t we? Otherwise, the plan won’t work.”

“He’s seen us both and knows our names. Or, at least the names we’ve given him.”

“I’ll take care of him. Trelawny too. Although I’m less concerned about Trelawny. Have you heard the cockamamey story he tells everyone about snatching Shelley’s heart out of his funeral pyre? Who would believe such a tale!”

“I did hear it! And do you remember the time he claimed that he had once been a pirate in India?” I felt my spirits lifting, just thinking about these ridiculous Englishmen. The fact that Trelawny was so full of shit and clearly entirely untrustworthy would ironically result in saving his life. “I thought Porthos was going to clobber him dead right then and there. But then you cleverly distracted him with a rack of lamb.”

Behind us, the sound of club-footed steps hit the gravel. Apparently the defacer of priceless monuments had finished making his mark.

“At least he hates Lord Elgin as much as you do,” Aramis purred into my ear and I melted against him.

“You’re right, flittermouse. Remind me to kill that prick too when we are done here,” I said.

“Ah, my friends!” Byron declared with a look of a man touched by the Eumenides, yet oblivious to the cause of his mental affliction. “What it is to stand here, on this sacred soil, with the likes of you!” I clenched my teeth. “You count,” he grabbed me by the hand whilst I tried not to flinch, “And you, doctor! You who love Hellas as much as I do, you must understand this elation I feel in my soul.”

“Perhaps, it is merely indigestion,” Aramis suggested with a meek expression. I made a mental note to reward him for that, later. “The vegetarian diet, my lord, it isn’t recommended, especially at a time of war.” I bit my lips to prevent an outburst of laughter.

“Do not frown so, Count Vrontis,” Byron now turned his attention to me. “Your magnificent brow will wrinkle. Ah, but you have that virility that is only given to a real Greek man!”

I looked over at Aramis, my eyes silently asking “Is it time yet?” My beloved’s face had grown stone cold and, for a brief moment, I had hoped that Byron would at last fall dead at my feet. But, alas, the moment passed.

“You are that type, dear count,” the poet kept on prattling, much to his own enjoyment, “of a man of great acumen and great passion, a man who has nothing but disdain for societal mores, but who had been thwarted in love, and more over is driven on by a certain penchant for self-destruction.”

“Like Childe Harold?” Aramis squeezed through his pointed teeth.

Byron tittered and patted his own stomach in a gesture of grotesque self-love. “I’m flattered you know my work, dear Flitterbatt.”

“I believe,” Aramis turned to me, his eyes bright with amusement, “that the Lord Byron has just called you a Byronic hero, my dear count.”

“How nice,” I replied. No, death was too good for him. Perhaps… my eyes strayed to his Pierino, but then…

“I will rip off your arm,” Aramis hissed into my ear. “And beat you to death with it.”

“That wouldn’t kill me,” I whispered back.

“But even a deviant like you would not enjoy that.”

Four hundred years later, and I was still struggling to find where the moral line lay with these Wallachian abominations.


	5. The Tragic Muse

**Sounion, October 1823**

“Don’t think it was an empty threat.” My teeth trailed along the groin of the God of Discord. “I saw the way you looked at him.”

Athos choked out a strangled laugh. “What, kitten?”

“I _will_ rip off your arm.” My mouth had reached the inside of his thigh and his pulse heaved.

“I know.” His hand on my face, and then he was pressing his finger into my mouth, between my teeth that clamped around the thin ring-shaped scar. “I know that you’re not above mutilation, chyortik.”

I growled, spit out his finger and drilled my fangs into his flesh. His blood thudded through his vein and shot out in a thick, red fountain. Athos groaned and spread his legs for me, pulling me in between his thighs and pressing my head down with a strong hand. The essence of Discord, sweet and spicy, hot with his body heat and with divine energy, thick and syrupy on my tongue. And Athos, panting and gorgeous, writhing in the sheets in a desperate attempt to impale himself on my teeth, harder, deeper, “ _More_.”

I pushed my hand between his legs, and he clutched the collar of my shirt in his desire to yank me closer. The slick heat, the way his flesh parted under the pressure of my fingers. The breathless, frantic sounds deep in his throat when I pushed a finger inside him. “ _More, Aramis._ ”

His thighs were trembling, his blood mingled with sweat and I gulped down the potent mixture greedily as I fucked him with my fingers, a whole bunch of them, pushing into him, pushing him open, hard and fast, forcing a filthy moan out of him with each thrust. His fingers tore at my shirt that hung off my shoulder, my hair that spilled over his groin. He was desperate to spend himself, his body clamping down on me in short spasms, his blood spiked with marrow-deep lust.

A sharp, sudden cry, somewhere at the periphery of my hearing. _Beware!_ Athos groaned and pushed down on my hand. “Fuck!” he panted hoarsely. “Aramis, what-”

I lifted my head off his thigh, heedless of the blood that spouted forth with each beat of his heart. Athos let go of my hair and raised himself on his elbows. The mantle of discord slipped down his shoulder in a whisper of fabric.

“Something’s wrong,” he breathed, tugging at the cloak. “I don’t remember taking the fuck blanket to bed with us.”

“We didn’t.” I looked at where my hand disappeared between his legs. “Oh, look, discord is afoot.” For the faint outline of his Achaean chiton shimmered whitely as his regalia began to manifest themselves. I pulled my hand out with a wet sound and wiped it on the sheets.

Athos was already rolling to his feet with the mantle wrapped around his shoulders. His armour flickered on and off, as if Discord couldn’t make up its mind. Since we had come to Greece, Athos’ Hellenic regalia manifested themselves more easily than they had done in the north. He grabbed his sword, while I reached for my pistol and my belt. We crept out of the bed-chamber, sliding along the green-stained walls like shadows. Past the sofa and the marble table in the sitting parlour and into the hall.

Moonshine poured like molten silver over the chairs, the bookcases, the bronze Aphrodite. All looked untouched, the door was closed, and yet my fangs tingled and Athos’ armour flashed from beneath the folds of his cloak. I opened the door and Athos stepped on the stairs that led down to the courtyard.

A human shape lay on the stones amidst a puddle of blood. Its fragrance wafted to me, powerful and dizzying. “Grimley,” I breathed.

The eyes of the God of Discord flashed. His pagan weapon morphed into the Archangel’s sword of fire, ready to destroy all that stood in his path. We slithered down the steps to glut the maw of Death.

The hunter was bathed in mercury and silver. The light of the moon struck his hat and black shadows obscured his face. _Prince Schilitzy._ The man who had travelled on the _Hercules_ from Genoa and who had disappeared from Byron’s entourage once the English lord had set foot on Hellenic soil. How many creatures had he destroyed in the months since his arrival? Had he slaughtered the god Pan and served his flesh to the Ottomans? Had he defiled temples of the ancient gods and barricaded the passages to Tartarus? Had he lured the Old Ones out of the shadows only to force them into eternal darkness?

His blade had struck down Athos’ guardian. His blood would be proffered as sacrifice to the pagan gods tonight.

He was strong and he was armed to the teeth. There was the obligatory shower with holy water, for those hunters had their superstitious little ritual to which they stuck religiously, but that was not his most formidable weapon. His two pistols discharged quickly, and, clad only in my shirt, I had to dive behind Athos, whose Achaean breastplate protected us both.

A hail of bullets rained down on us from the shadows. Athos staggered back and new fountains of blood erupted on his skin. The hunter had brought minions – Greek mercenaries, crude butchers, driven by superstition and bloodlust. They knew about bloodsucking creatures, which they called _vrykolakas_ , and they had their own ways to deal with them. Athos and I had laughed when we first heard how the Greeks subdued their unruly deceased: they exhumed them and poured wine over them, while a priest read from scripture. An excellent strategy, from where I was standing.

Not these men. Pouring wine over my body or Athos’ did not figure in their modus operandi. A bullet hit my arm and I shot the assailant in the chest, incensed beyond endurance. The odour of blood everywhere, red mist rising around us, the fire of wrath and of victory raging in my breast. I thrust my blade deep into the gut of one man and brought down the barrel of my pistol on the skull of another, in a blow that equalled even that of Porthos.

Behind me, Athos’ sword flashed through the air, engaged in mortal combat with the Prince Skilitzy. The human was fast, his blows deadly to anyone but Athos. I divested myself of two or three attackers with ease. Their bodies twitched in the agony of death while I glided up the wall and caught a man who attempted to escape. His blood rushed into my mouth and mingled with the taste of Athos’ divine essence. So much rage. So much fear. The fervour of faith and the thirst for blood. The essence of humanity, replenishing my veins.

I kicked the drained carcass back into the courtyard and jumped down, landing on the soft pile of bodies. The God of Discord was looming over the spread-eagled form of his enemy, who lay in a pool of blood.

“How many?” Athos was asking through clenched teeth. “How many did you bring with you?”

Silence. Dark eyes glittering in the pale face. The mouth a thin line, black with blood.

“ _How many are there?_ ”

“None.”

Athos and I turned around. A shape approached from the direction of the house, black against its white walls. A rope dragged across the ground in its wake, and it carried a pair of shoes and a hammer, dripping with blood.

“Bartleby!” Athos and I exclaimed.

“They surprised me,” my valet declared. “But I surprised them in turn.” He lifted the hammer.

“Oh, well done, my friend!” Athos said. “I believe it was also you who shouted to warn us?”

The leprechaun bowed. “Indeed, sir.”

“Bartleby, I declare: you are the most useful servant I ever had,” I commended him.

“Thank you, Dr Flitterbatt. I live to serve.” He held out the shoes to me. “For you, sir.”

Athos had abandoned the dying hunter and sunk to his knees by Grimley’s side. He cupped the Grigori’s face and was talking to him in soft tones.

“He’s alive.”

“Of course he is.” I pulled the shoes over my bloodied feet. “He’s immortal.”

“He is badly hurt, Aramis.”

I walked over to my lover and his bleeding angel and reached for his wrist. The Grigori whimpered. “Oh, stop whining, Grimley. You’ll be fine, I’m a doctor.”

“Excuse me, gentlemen.” Behind our backs, Bartleby cleared his throat. “The prince is about to expire. If you have any questions that you wish to address to him, now would be a good time.” He picked up a discarded dagger and cut through the rope that was slung around his wrist. “Oops,” he added as Athos and I approached the hunter. “Too late.” He tossed the dagger on the dead man’s chest and rubbed his hands.

“Tell us what happened, Bartleby,” Athos said.

“I was in the kitchen, polishing Dr Flitterbatt’s shoes,” the leprechaun said. “A heel was in need of repair. One of them must have climbed over the wall, and before I knew it, he had overpowered me and tied me up.”

“Did you not try to bargain?” Athos smirked. “Promised to grant him three wishes if he let you go?”

The leprechaun’s eyes flashed behind his spectacles. “To be sure, to be sure!” he exclaimed in an exaggerated Irish accent and capered a merry jig on the spot. “And I did: I granted him a swift death, I granted him an unembarrassing death, and I didn’t throw his body to the pigs. You can’t say fairer than that.”

“Being whacked over the head with a hammer by a leprechaun is not what I’d call not embarrassing,” Athos said.

“I knifed him, sir,” Bartleby said. “The hammer, that was for the other two.”

“Three bodies in the kitchen,” I counted, “a good half dozen in the courtyard, plus the prince. We need to throw them into the sea before sunrise. And Grimley has decided to take his sick leave _now_.”

“We have to carry Grimley into the house and then get rid of the bodies,” Athos said. “And the blood.” He pointed at the dark patches, like spilled pitch on white stones. “We mustn’t leave a mess behind when we set off tomorrow, the landlord might get suspicious and send henchmen after us.”

“Perhaps not,” Bartleby said. “Have you considered, gentlemen, that you can use the carnage to your advantage?”

“I’m intrigued,” Athos said. “Go on, Master Bartleby.”

“If we make it look like it was the Ottomans who butchered these men, surely it would advance the Hellenic cause, count.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” I said. “Some of them look pretty butchered already.” I licked my lip and wiped my mouth on my hand.

My valet twirled his hammer between his fingers. “Impale ‘em.”

Grimley had stopped bleeding by the time Athos carried him inside and set him down on the couch. He pulled a quilt over the Grigori and patted his pale hand. “You just lie here, Grimley,” he said. “Your wounds are closing already, you’ll be right as rain in the morning.”

“Kyrios,” Grimley said in a low voice. “Don’t listen to the leprechaun. You can’t seriously consider shoving pointy stakes into your dead enemies’ arses.” His voice dropped even lower. “No matter what your flitterfriend is telling you. I hear they like that sort of thing in Wallachia.”

“I’m right here, Grimley,” I said, crossing my arms.

“Sirs!” Grimley whimpered in anguished tones. “Think of your honour as gentlemen!”

“It must be the fever speaking,” I said to Athos. “Don’t be silly, Grimley. We wouldn’t shove pointy stakes into anyone’s arses. That’s a servant's job.”

A crash, a clang in the courtyard, and a juicy Irish curse, as my valet stockpiled weapons and equipment for our convenience. It never hurt to familiarise oneself with the enemy’s technologies.

“Bartleby certainly seems very keen on it,” Athos said. “I never knew leprechauns were so bloodthirsty.”

“What do you expect, Kyrios, from a creature of such provenance?” Grimley hissed theatrically.

“What, Ireland?”

“Don’t you know where the leprechauns’ foul origins lie?” The Olympian guardian closed his eyes and pressed his hand to his forehead in a dramatic display of agitation. Athos looked at me, and I shrugged. Grimley opened his eyes again and pointed his outstretched arm at the door. “They are the offspring of an evil spirit and a degenerated fairy!”

“Well,” I said into the brief silence that followed. “I will make sure to thank Marion for her gift.” Another clank from outside, metal hitting on metal. “I believed him to be nothing but a humble shoemaker. I didn’t expect him to be _valuable_.”

Athos stood and held his hand out to me. “Come, Aramis,” he said. “We have to tend to our wounds before anything else. I believe I have several bullets stuck in my body which I would ask you to remove, doctor.”

I bowed and kissed his hand. “With pleasure, count. Let me fetch my best knife.”

“And a bottle of tsipouro.”

I wrinkled my nose. “A filthy concoction. Even if it was made on Mt. You.”

He pulled me in and kissed me, and not even Grimley’s sounds of distress could stop me from squeezing his bottom, now that his battle attire had dematerialised.

***

**Hucknall, July 1824**

Byron’s funeral cortège had arrived in Albion, to a chorus of lamentations of appropriately Greek proportions. We had left him in Missolonghi, though I cannot say we left him in perfect health. With the help of Anemoi, we had reached England far ahead of any news of his demise, and far beyond suspicion.

I nibbled on Aramis’ earlobe, as he poured over the day’s papers. He bent his neck under my onslaught and his hand pressed against the curve of my cheek.

“You know, they will not let him be laid to rest at Westminster Abbey,” he purred.

“Sweet darling George? But _why_?” I pressed a kiss into the nape of his neck, my tongue trailing over his soft hairline.

“ _Questionable morality_ ,” Aramis quoted, his shoulders shrugging with the barest of laughs.

“No! Not true!”

I pulled him from the chair and we both tumbled to the floor, laughing like children. “We should tell Grimley not to allow anyone in,” Aramis whispered as my mouth traveled down his body, to reward him for services rendered to Greece, and me personally. “Everyone should know we’re in the deepest state of mourning.”

The Church of St. Mary Magdalene was brimming with humanity. England had come to mourn her wayward son, albeit not all of England, and away from the pomp and circumstance of London. I personally suggested that we sever his head from his body, in case he had found some way to turn revenant himself. But Aramis, in his capacity as a physician, had reassured me Lord Byron was not going to rise from his grave again, living or dead.

“Now is the time, my pagan prince,” Aramis had said. “I imagine a great public outcry at the grim homecoming of their hero. The British sentiments and military prowess will surely turn towards Greece.”

“I’m tired of waiting, Aramis,” I sighed, my eyes scanning the lines of the mourners gathered at Byron’s graveside. “Look at them,” my lips curled despite myself. “Making a spectacle of themselves over a man who did not give a single toss about them. All Byron cared for was his own narrative. Well, lo, there he lies.”

“Tragic,” Aramis shook his head, his curls coming loose over his dark eyes, a smile tucked into the corner of his plump lips. “Gone too soon, sweet George.”

“Yes,” I replied with affected melancholy. “Poor sweet George. May the earth be as soft as down feather to him, as the Russians say.”

“My lords,” a young voice sounded at my right elbow. “It is so good to see his friends here. Especially you, who knew him in Greece.”

I turned my face, schooling my features into a mask of profound grief, and then could not help but smile upon beholding my interlocutor. “My _dear_ count Gamba!” I exclaimed. “What a terrible blow this must be to you!”

Pierino fell into my outstretched arms and they coiled around him, shielding him from the other mourners and Aramis’ steely gaze. I grinned at my beloved over the head of Byron’s boy-toy. He had taken this one to Greece with him, even while having the boy’s own sister for a mistress. I did not know how Byron did it, but one had to admire his temerity.

“There now, my young count,” I had taken him apart, as the coffin was being interred, away from prying eyes and gossiping lips. “Your name - Pietro - is derived from the Latin word for ‘stone.’ Now, I know your George wouldn’t have wanted you to turn your heart to stone, my friend, but you must bear up under this anvil weight.” As if to demonstrate what I meant, I propped him up with one hand, and for a moment, his mortal coil appeared naught but a feather to me. Ashes blowing in the wind.

I blinked and looked about. Where had Aramis gone? 

“Count Vrontis,” Pietro Gamba had addressed me, his lower lips still aquiver.

“Call me Athos,” I responded, mechanically. “Were you at his side when he passed?”

“I was,” the young man’s pale face trembled at the recollection.

“It must have been terrible.”

“You can’t imagine, count… Athos.” 

He was wrong. I could imagine it quite vividly. I was very familiar with the penchant of the medics to bleed their patients to death, especially if they had suffered a sudden onslaught of fever. Seeking words of consolation, I found my tongue uncooperative in that regard. “I’m sure he suffered greatly,” I replied instead. “That is, I’m sure _you_ suffered greatly. Sweet boy,” I whispered, drawing my thumb down his cheek to chase the trails of his tears, “loyal to him to the bitter end.”

“I could do nothing to save him,” the charming countling sighed.

“No, I imagine not.”

He was quite pretty, Byron’s Pierino. Quite pretty, and so alone in the world. The very epitome of vulnerability. A worse man might have taken advantage of his state. I smiled, “Pietro, come with me. You should not be alone right now.” Then again, perhaps the years of chasing after hunters and Romantics alike had rendered me the worse man. 

It surprised me that my hatred for the tragically departed Byron had somehow given birth to an archaic need to claim what had once been his. I felt the mantle of Discord tighten around my frame as I lowered my eyes, caressing count Gamba’s body with my gaze. He had allowed me to kiss him in the carriage rushing us away from the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, his eyes first widening in shock, then closing in pleasure. Grimley had arranged rooms for me and Aramis at a local inn, and it was there, up to those rooms that I had conducted Pierino.

“You are young, your wounds have time to heal,” I had said. A long time ago, I seemed to recall saying the same words to d’Artagnan. He too had lost a lover. He too needed to be comforted. Perhaps I knew better back then.

“I do not think anyone will ever make me feel the way George did,” the count from Romagna said, even as my fingers unbuttoned the numerous hooks and traps of his attire.

“Lord Byron was only a man,” I said. “Men are like grains of sand in the ocean.”

“Is that what I am, too? A grain of sand?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with the fire of innocence lost.

“You are an autumn leaf,” I said, “blown by the wind. Beautiful in your crimson colors, but lost to the season.”

“What a terrible thing to say, my lord,” Pierino smiled at me just as I pushed him onto the bed. “Do you speak this way to all your lovers?”

I laughed in lieu of response and pressed my mouth to his to shut him up. Lord Byron’s foolish boy, what did he know of love and poetry? He had been barely twenty years old when he had sailed off with George Gordon and his merry crew of hunters and adventurers.

He spread his legs underneath my body, the smell of very human arousal hitting me with all its unrefined aroma. He smelled of sweat and tears and having been on a ship for too long.

“You sweet dandelion, Pierino,” I muttered into the skin of his chest. One exhale from my lips, and you’d blow away. “I don’t think you’ve ever been with a man like me.” 

I took my time stretching him around my fingers, forcing down his moans with my own mouth clamped over his. It pleased me to take what Byron could not hold on to, but I had no desire to cause him physical pain. When I deemed him ready, I flipped him over and ran my hand down the curve of his spine. His back arched up towards me, and I slipped inside, my smile hidden from his view. For a few blissful moments I knew what the gods had felt when they lay claim on unsuspecting mortals. This act of thievery, through time and space it bound me more firmly to my sister, even though she had been lost to me for good.

Pierino shuddered beneath me, his moan smothered by the pillow into which I had pushed his face. He was soaked with his own sweat and my seed that dripped out of his hole and ran down the backs of his thighs. I pressed my lips to his shoulder blade and pulled the covers over him. I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to let him sleep for a bit, before shoving him out the door and into another carriage.

Sated and rather complacent, I allowed my eyes to close for a few moments. The mortal boy slept in my arms, marked as my own in ways he had not contemplated.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

I opened my eyes and Aramis stared down upon me, like the statue of the Commander must have looked upon Don Juan.

“Mine are the spoils of War,” I smiled lazily up at him. Besides me, Pierino softly snored on.

Aramis’ lips twitched in a lopsided grin. He walked over the the window and drew open the curtains, letting the rays of sunlight penetrate the room. The weather was shockingly pleasant for and English afternoon.

“Had you learned nothing at all at Troy?” my beloved asked, positioning himself between the window and the bed. I watched as the dark outlines of his shadow crept up over the covers and fell upon the young count Gamba.

“Don’t,” I whispered, with a sudden pang of regret.

“You should have thought of that before you brought him here.”

I extricated myself from under the covers and walked up to my beloved, pulling him out of the way of the rays of light. “You’ll burn yourself to a crisp, my little nightwing.” 

But it had been too late. Pietro Gamba had already been suffering from bouts of a mysterious illness by the time he returned to Greece the next spring. I had not been surprised a year later to learn he had succumbed to the typhoid fever, no doubt, like Byron’s, exacerbated by the physician’s insistence on medicinal blood-letting.

***

The God of Discord had claimed the spoils of war as his, and I had given him my blessing. A power greater, stronger, more ancient than myself had compelled me to bend my steps away from the Church of St. Mary Magdalene and to roam the streets of Hucknall under the cloak of the respectable gentleman. A silvery thread, like a faint beam of moonlight, reeled me in, and I followed it into the labyrinths of alleys. Even though he didn’t know it yet, the man was awaiting me there, and his blood spilled into my mouth from veins that burst like ripe grapes.

I turned my blood-stained mouth towards Helios, permitting his glare to blind me. Within the whiteness, a black streak appeared, a hangman’s rope that pulled me up to my feet and dragged me towards my destination. I traversed the streets in a somnambular state, into the darkness of the inn, up the shadowy stairs, and into the umbrage of our room.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Discord’s armour ensconced him like a shell. The marked boy slept in his arms, flushed and faint like those mortals who had slept in his Father’s arms. He had ransacked Troy, and he had consummated his victory.

The God of Discord opened his eyes. “Mine are the spoils of War.” The ancient, heathen smirk curled his lips, and in the rhythm of his words I heard the beat of drums, of Achaean warriors marching in formation. Here and now, he was not of this world. Not a man lay in the bed, but an archaic deity, a primal force made flesh.

I grinned down at him and walked to the window. I drew the curtains to admit Helios in: a Titanic force even older, more primal than Discord. “Had you learned nothing at Troy?”

They were not omnipotent, those Hellenic deities. They did not dwell in ether’s starry ice. They suffered vicious miseries, they revelled in intoxicating deliriums; they savoured the bloodied frenzy of a thousand hangman’s meals, they wallowed in carnal desires and twitched in spasms of lust.

His eyes followed the outline of my shadow, as it slithered across the covers to devour the boy.

“ _Don’t._ ”

Blackness bruised the boy’s skin, dug its claws into his lungs and sucked his essence with voracious maws.

The warmth of a human body, of bare flesh, the familiar scent of his damp, sated skin, stained with the odour of the mortal boy, enveloped me. The armour of Discord had vanished, and it was a man, not a pagan god, who was wrapping his arms around me and muttering soft words in my ear. “ _My little nightwing._ ”

My shadow had curled in its tendrils. It crept back into the darkness whence it had come, sated and appeased like the God of Discord himself.


	6. Songs of Innocence

**England, 1820s**

The Slaughters. Michaelmas lately over, and the Komis Athos Vrontis sitting in Gildedhorn Abbey. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the roads as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Eastleach Hill.

“What are you doing, chyortik?” His voice carried the note of mockery that had been familiar of old, a glint of steel that cut through the lassitude and languor upon which he floated. There was nothing to do for him here, away from the war that would decide if his country would free itself from Ottoman shackles.

As I had predicted, Byron’s death and martyrdom had spawned a surge of indignation among the English, and noble Britannia had set off to defeat the savage Turk. We had not joined the fray. The Greek War was too close to home. It was too dangerous for us both to linger in Hellas for too long and to spill gallons after gallons of blood on Greek soil.

And so we exiled ourselves to England’s green and pleasant land: the Greek count, whose delicate health prevented him from fighting for his country’s freedom, and his physician. We rented a place in the country, we lay low, we bided our time.

“Reading,” I told Athos without lifting my eyes from the latest edition of the _Medico-Chirurgical Transactions_. “A most fascinating article on smallpox, my dear count.”

“I wasn’t aware that you studied that disease, doctor.”

“Oh, I do indeed. It doesn’t always kill its victims, you know,” I said mildly. “Sometimes, it merely leaves them disfigured, yet immune.” I smiled up at him. “Is that a worthwhile price to pay, you think, Athos?”

***

It had been Grimley who’d suggested making England our home for the time being. Not surprisingly, for since he had returned in the vessel of an Englishman, he had developed a strong predilection for foggy climes and soggy food. And perhaps it had been time for Athos and me to stop running and to catch our breath after the streak of excitements that had marked the last years.

_Or perhaps…_

It had been Bartleby who’d led us to a pot of gold. “Invest into the steam locomotive, gentlemen,” he’d said, ignoring Athos’ pique, for that gentleman distrusted those new-fangled inventions that the new generation of engineers appeared to spew every few months. In the end, we trusted the leprechaun’s financial genius – to the delight of a flabbergasted George Stephenson, into whose endeavours we invested a considerable sum, for the simple reason that he had named a travelling engine _Blücher_.

***

Wandering under grey skies, his hair swept by winds that were neither human nor equine, but shapeless, formless, invisible forces that did not speak to him and did not bring him any news from the heights of Olympus, the God of Discord was somewhat faded. I had not seen the Achaean armour manifest itself around his body in a long time. The mantle of Discord was nothing but a woollen blanket, which kept the count warm on those cold November nights when he sat reading in his library, and drinking wine.

_Or perhaps it had been time to separate Athos from the waters and shores of his birth._

***

The news of Pierino Gamba’s death had reached us in the month of autumn, in the year of our Lord, a half-sentence, a polite mutter at a gathering, _You had been acquainted with Lord Byron, Doctor Flitterbatt, had you not? A companion of his… typhoid… so young… sad loss._

“A sad loss indeed,” I said with a polite bow, while Athos smiled a melancholy smile. His arm was safe from my wrath, for I neither had nor would rip it off.

His wrists bled that night, drenching the pillows through and through. His shoulders taut, muscles strained by the ropes that tied him to the bedposts, as I ploughed him deeply, clinging to him with my teeth.

A part of Discord lived in him, always, no matter how many thousand miles lay between him and Olympus. Yet the serene countryside, the pale northern sun, the insipid chatter of landed gentry and genteel poverty did not spark its divine flame into life.

“I saw the way you looked at the stable boy, Athos.”

The count smirked. “And how is that, Aramis?”

“Somebody might lose a limb.”

“Or fall ill with smallpox?”

“Indeed.” I paused and regarded the magnificent body, sprawled across his favourite chair with loose-limbed grace. “It would be a kindness. Servants who had the smallpox and survived are highly employable.”

***

Between my thighs, his body tensed and he gasped. “Don’t eat the choir, Aramis.” Fresh-faced youths with hairless skin and voices honed to sing the praise of God.

“It would be a shame to sow Discord in the parish.” I licked a long path along the arch of his throat, where his blood called out to me like it had done for centuries. 

“That is not going to happen.” He held me fast by my hips, like he had done the first night I’d come to him, and forced me to still. “It would upset the neighbours.”

“Show me how much you don’t want the neighbours to get upset, you deviant.” I leaned in and tugged at his lips with my teeth. “Spread your legs and _show me_.”

***

Count Vrontis had fifteen thousand a year, as local gossip had it, which was just about enough to forgive him his Continental provenance. He had danced with somebody’s daughter at the ball in the assembly hall. “Permit me to extend my sincerest felicitations on your upcoming nuptials, Kyrios,” Grimley had said the next morning as he drew the curtains and picked up a blood-soaked pillow from the floor. Athos rolled his head woozily and I dug my nails into the muscles of his chest.

“What are you talking about?”

“Both Upper and Lower Slaughter - nay, I dare say the entire county are abuzz with the news. I understand Kyrios not only danced with, but also smiled at the young lady, which can mean only one thing: an engagement is imminent. Will Kyrios require the carriage to convey him to the English rose’s family home, or is he going on horseback?”

“I’ll convey you to Tartarus if you don’t shut up.” I snaked my arm around Athos’ ribcage and glued my open palm to his damp skin. “The count is indisposed, the draught in the assembly hall has exacerbated his ailment. Feverish consumption,” I whispered into the pale shell of his ear as he pressed his lips into the hollow of my throat. “Your health is very delicate, count. The English climate does not agree with you.”

“What do you recommend, doctor?”

***

Count Vrontis’ manners might have struck the populace as rather Continental, but not even the most respectable mother could ever reproach him for discourteous conduct or a forward manner towards any of her daughters. He lived the life of a recluse on account of his health, tended to by his physician who, despite his youth, had an extensive knowledge of human anatomy and of diseases. Occasionally, the local squire would ask the services of Dr Flitterbatt. “I never knew a doctor who wielded a knife so skilfully,” the squire told me, full of admiration. “Upon my honour, doctor, when you bleed me, I barely feel a thing.”

Athos occasionally accompanied me on my medial errands, for he had taken a fancy to the squire’s family, who was mercifully lacking in sons or daughters of marriageable age. When I returned from the bedchamber where I had applied phlebotomy and prescribed a herbal essence (a method that generally did the trick), I found Athos in conversation with the squire’s sister who had taken a great fancy to him. The worthy widow had lived in her brother’s household ever since her own had broken apart after all her sons had fallen at Waterloo. But it was unlikely that they had fallen either by Athos’ hands or mine, for the English had been fighting on our side, and we would not have done anything as dishonourable as killing our own allies. Not even in the throes of passion.

***

**Troy, 1190 BC**

_Your name is Discord and Discord is what you sow._

The Goddess of Discord let the boy’s words wash over her, and her wings scraped against the sand, covering up the trails of her footsteps as she took flight.

It was the third year of the war, and she and Ares would have a glut of bodies yet. But the siege was long and her patience not indefinite. When would their Father’s latest spawn show his true colors? She watched and she waited.

Then, the son of Thetis came, golden hair strewn about, unburdened of his gilded helmet that shone as bright as Apollo’s own armor on the field of battle. Jumped up sea nymph! Who did she think she was to make her son invulnerable? What infernal power gave her the gall to not invite Eris to her wedding?

The son of Thetis stood before the son of Zeus and they smiled at each other as if they shared a secret.

“Who is she?” Achilles asked and Athos looked towards the sea, towards that place where the audacious mother of the leader of the Myrmidons dwelled.

“Who?”

“You know whom I mean,” the son of Thetis spoke. “That woman… that _goddess_ who comes to you so often under the cloak of night.” But the son of Eirene would keep her secret.

“She’s nobody,” Athos said.

“Does Odysseus know?”

“Should Odysseus care?” There was just enough bitterness in his voice to warm her heart, but not enough to show weakness to his peer.

Achilles sank down onto the sand, and Athos lowered himself as well. The barest glimmer from the camp fires that reached the shore illuminated his hand as he let the grains of sand run out from his loose fist.

“Back home,” he had spoken quietly, “the sand is black from the volcanic rock, and it glimmers like stars in the night sky.”

“On Thira?” Achilles sighed almost wistfully, scooting closer to his companion.

“I think of her, you know. My mother,” Athos said. “Left alone, without me to protect her. But perhaps she is better off without me.”

Achilles nodded in silent comprehension. “My mother too,” he whispered, as if afraid to admit a secret that had been known to all. “Sometimes I wonder, if she would rather not have had me. For how could she love something that had been forced upon her?” Athos remained mute. “But she does.” The son of Thetis reached out and touched the son of Zeus upon the shoulder and Eris felt her wings rise up and tremble in the wind.

In the distance, the laughter of men. Those who did not sleep, drank, for what else was there to do as they waited for the intransigent walls of Troy to come down.

“Thank you, Achilles,” Athos’ head nodded forward and his friend’s hand slid up the back of his neck and his fingers got lost somewhere among the dark curls. Achilles’ hair had been golden, like the rays of Helios’ chariot. Oh, how Eris wanted to grab him by his hair and harden his heart. But not yet, _not yet_.

Soon came Patroclus, silent like his own shade, and then Yorgas the Grigori, who had told the son of Zeus that Odysseus had been asking for him, and the two demigods parted ways, each to his own tent.

Or rather, to Odysseus’ tent. Heavy was his step, for he had known the steps to that tent had been numbered.

“What does he want?” Athos’ hands brushed grains of sand off the planes of his body. Soon, very soon, those tufts of dark hair around his nipples would blossom across his chest, and then the King of Ithaca would not open his tent flap so easily. 

“He had been in council with Menelaus and Agamemnon,” the Grigori reported. And that set the young demigod’s teeth on edge, for he had resolved to hate Agamemnon from the day he had watched him slit his own daughter’s throat and turn her into wind, upon that rock of Aulis. “I would imagine he wants something to lighten the mood.”

Eris spun in the air, laughing. Playful Euros got tangled up in her hair and ruffled her feathers. _Beautiful boy. Deadly, beautiful boy._ Could he hear her laughter, her younger brother? Did he know? _My beautiful boy. Mine._

The Titaness Selene had been a fool to ask Father to grant Endymion immortality. She only got to watch her beloved in an eternal sleep. Eris was not a Titan - she would prove smarter than that.

And Athos? While the King of Ithaca pulled off his chiton and let his hands caress the contours of his body, too broad now, too war-worn to belong to a mere boy - did he know that she was watching him? _Mine, mine, mine._

Watching and waiting.

***

**Upper Slaughter, August 1827**

William Blake’s forehead had been too high and his chin too round. There was something about his eyes that made one wonder whether the Eumenides were not punishing him for some long begotten misdeed. He had not been a bosom companion of Byron, a fact that, no doubt, had kept him very much alive well into his sixties, despite the fact that his oracular visions would have led any hunter worth his salt to us much faster than Shelley’s odes or Byron’s narratives.

William Blake knew things that no mere mortal had any business knowing. He got away with it by making others believe he was mad, like my fictitious nemesis Hamlet. He would have continued getting away with it, painting his nymphs and his demons with an intrepid stroke, except that William Blake had the misfortune of discovering something on his travels through France.

His hopes for the French revolutionaries turned to bitter disappointment as Terror Reigned and heads rolled. (There is a part of me that still freezes when I think of the blade that dared separate Aramis’ head from his body that fateful day he encountered Marion the Fairy, not Marion the Courtesan.) France had been in turmoil. Churches were burned, castles were leveled and their stones used to build scaffolds for Madame Guillotine. Amidst this havoc, Mr Blake had been a recipient of a locked casket of unknown origin. Some said it came from Picardy, while others claimed it came from the Loire Valley. Time and rust had loosened the lock, and out came scrolls, written in tongues no man in his position should have been trained to understand.

_Tyger Tyger, burning bright,_  
_In the forest of the night;_  
_What immortal hand or eye_  
_Could frame thy fearful symmetry?_

“Chyortik!” I exclaimed, dropping Blake’s _Songs of Experience_ to the floor. My pointer, whom I had lazily named Devil because that was what my beloved kept calling him already, picked up his snout and sniffed at the air with a look of fierce protectiveness. “Have you read these? Have you been asleep on the job all this time?” 

Aramis moved an eyebrow, ostensibly unimpressed. “Blake is mad, or it is sufficient that everyone thinks so.”

“Songs of Experience, indeed,” I muttered, scratching behind Devil’s ear. “It’s not _his_ experience though, is it?”

“What are you going on about? Do I need to worry?” Reluctantly, my graceful son of Carpathia rose from his work to come sit at my side. “Why the long face?” His thumb traced my lower lip. “You’re pouting, sir.” Devil made an abortive attempt at licking Aramis’ shoes and was shooed away.

“Blake stole my poems,” I declared, feeling rather like a petulant child whose favorite toy had been not only taken away, but played with to greater aplomb by another child. “Look!” I shoved the blasted Tyger into his face, and then I did, in fact, pout.

“Hm,” was all that Aramis had to say for himself.

“Hm?”

“It does appear he simply replaced your ‘little chyortik’ with this… Tyger.”

“As if Byron’s cultural appropriation wasn’t enough, now I have to sit here and behold William Blake taking credit for my love poetry. Is Erato _his_ sister too?” I groused. “No, I highly doubt that!”

Aramis narrowed his eyes at me until his black irises disappeared behind the curtain of his long lashes.

“Oh no, my love. This will not pass.” His fangs gleamed brightly between the coral petals of his lips.

_In what distant deeps or skies,_  
_Burn the fire of thine eyes?_  
_On what wings dare he aspire?_  
_What the hand, dare seize the fire?_

With my own hand, I dared, and I seized. His moan tickled the back of my own throat as I licked over the sharp ridges of his teeth with my tongue. “Eat him, Aramis,” I sighed, even as my hand molded against the heated flesh of his engorged cock. “Eat him for me, my sweet angel.”

We hastened to London, seeking out Fountain Court in the darkest hour of night. One could not make out either moon or stars, the land being England, and it by habit being shrouded in a cover of fog and dreariness, even in the month of August.

“And into my garden stole, when the night had veiled the pole,” Aramis giggled, his breath brushing against the nape of my neck like the wings of a butterfly. Beyond the fence, in the room with a solitary candle, Blake toiled on his Dante engravings. Did he know that death was nigh, and that it hunted him on silent, jealous wings? “In the morning, glad I see, my foe outstretched beneath the tree,” Aramis recited Blake’s ‘The Poison Tree.’

“Do not be cute, flittermouse,” I pressed his hand to my heart. “That man defiles the early days of our love by making them public property.”

“If you put it that way, my sentimental God of Discord, I shall make him suffer a thousand deaths before I drink my fill.”

“Good,” I drawled out, kissing him one last time, before setting him free to spring upon the walls of Fountain Court.

Poor William Blake. He died the next day, his mind so scrambled that it is told he broke out into songs of heaven and angels and swore eternal love to his wife before he expired. Elsewhere, my angel of death slid with an exhausted moan off my softening cock and nuzzled into my neck. They would not perform an autopsy on the great artist, but if they had, they would have been amazed to find so little blood left in him.

***

**England, The Slaughters, 1830s**

“Medical science has made considerable progress lately,” I grumbled over the _Glasgow Medical Journal_.

“And that displeases chyortik?” Athos tugged my cravat down and kissed me on the neck, just beneath the ear. “Why? Is bleeding no longer the recommended panacea? Will Dr Flitterbatt have to expand his medical knowledge?”

“It’s like those humans expect to live forever.” I rolled my head to the side and Athos’ tongue and teeth grazed over my skin. “Which bit of ‘mortal being’ do they not understand?”

“What have they done now?”

“Realised the importance of livor mortis.” I sighed and rolled my head back, into the warmth and heartbeat of Athos’ body. “I’ve just read a long article on what it tells you about the position of the body at the time of death.”

“So?”

“So, if livor mortis does not present…” Athos began to untie the elaborate knot of my cravat with deft fingers. “If there is no post-mortem bruising caused by blood pooling to the lowest parts of the body, somebody will get suspicious. Leaving a bloodless corpse behind is dangerous.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way around it, kitten.”

***

_To battle, Achaean, to battle!_

The ancient cry reverberated through Athos’ blood. Discord’s legacy thrummed through him, pumping mouthful after mouthful of divine nectar into my mouth.

_Victory!_

“You have won, Athos,” I whispered into his ear as he drove into me, pushing himself in deeper and deeper, as if attempting to screw us together into one single organism. I bit into his neck again, sucking in the power, the virility, the flavour of _deus victor_.

“Hellas is free!” he gasped as he fucked me. “Aramis… _my love_.”

The Ottomans had fallen. The flag of Greek Independence had been raised. The last battle won, we gave thanks to Ares.

***

“Come to bed, Aramis.”

“Hang on.” I crossed the room on shaky legs and splashed my face with water at the washbasin. “I need to stretch my limbs.”

“We have to celebrate the victory of my people.”

“We’ve been celebrating the victory of your people for… how long?” I frowned. Athos and I had stumbled into the bedchamber together, I remembered that distinctly, but everything that happened afterwards was a blur. I had sustained myself on nothing but divine essence for days, possibly weeks. Time meant nothing.

Suddenly, he was behind me, bending me over the dressing table and dragging his damp cock through the cleft of my arse.

“Let’s celebrate some more.”

I groaned and pushed my hips into him. Who cared if we didn’t leave Gildedhorn Abbey ever again. Time meant nothing. The world outside meant nothing. We had lived inside the churning whirlpool of events for centuries, it was time to let ourselves drift in calmer waters.

***

**The Orne**

Dripping and dribbling through the soft soil. Trickling through sand, squeezing through clay. Pearling to the surface, to the light, to the light. Sieved through the earth; scattered, then mixing, into the stream, into the river, into the sea.

_Panta rhei._

A powerful gush, foaming and churning, sweet waters, salt waters, the waters of life. Waves after waves crested and broke, roiling and boiling in the mad dance of rebirth.

I live again.

Here, in the surf, where salt and sweet waters commingle, the ondines are born. Where rivers crush into the sea; where the sea thrusts its waves into the open delta, this is where my life begins anew. I _am_ again. _I_ am again.

I am one with my sisters, for we are water. Ethereal and solid, playful and cruel, we know nothing, we feel nothing but the cold of the depth and the warmth of the sun. We dance and we twinkle, we destroy and we devour. I mutter merrily as I run through a meadow, I shimmer green as I meander through the woods. Wherever I go, I glitter and lure with the promise to nourish. With the promise to revive.

The girls came to me every day, for summer heat pressed down on the lands and they sought to refresh themselves after a day in the field. The days of harvest are the longest of the year, and it wasn’t until the sun began to set that the girls were released from their duties and permitted to wash their bare, bloodied feet, their sore hands and arms and their dusty faces in the stream. My waters flowed muddy and grey, I lay low and indolent in my bed, cradled and rocked by the rippling waves.

There was one girl, prettier, daintier than the others. With narrow hands and feet and skin that was scorched by the sun. Her companions’ skin was darker, coarser; they tanned where she burned. I heard her voice, the vowels unrefined and provincial, yet she possessed a trill in the back of her throat that would one day be alluring if I fostered it.

Water is patient. There was nothing for me to do but lie in wait, splishing and sloshing, and the girl drank me greedily. I burst on her tongue, I soothed her parched lips and throat. I revived her blood, I pumped in her heart, I throbbed through her veins, through her limbs, through her loins. All humans crave me, and she craved me more than most.

Autumn came, and I grew colder. Rain made me swell and sparkle. I shimmered, I lured, I enticed. The girls no longer came every day, for heat and harvest were over.

She came. She washed every day. She washed her clothes and those of her family. She sang, and I sang with her. I learned the timbre of her voice, the touch of her hands, the feel of her skin. As days grew shorter, her skin grew paler. Her fingers were no longer scratched and scabby, and I nurtured their nimble playfulness as I slipped and weaved between them. Her hand chased me, and then, one day, we touched.

The girl froze. She frowned as she gazed intently into the waters. My Narcissa, she sought her own reflection, but what I showed her was my face. Her features mingled with mine, and then I smiled and she smiled back.

She wasn’t pretty, but one day, she would be beautiful.

Years passed. Time meant nothing. Water is eternal.

In summer, I soothed her. In autumn, I played with her. In winter, I made glittering sculptures for her and showed her my face in mirrors of ice. Every spring, she welcomed me back with songs and flowers, the way mortal girls had done since the beginning of time. On the shortest night of the year, she coronated me with a flower crown, which I carried down the Dieuge, to the Ure, to the Orne, through the rugged gorges and verdant reliefs of Normandy, to the sea, to the sea.

Autumn came. Water drops glittered on the pearls of the rowan berry collier that lay around her neck. My gift to her. She stroked it with tender fingers and gazed into the fluvial mirror, and she laughed with joy as she beheld her own beauty.

Her fingers were slim and nimble, her hair thick and glossy, her figure lithe as she stood on the verge of bursting into the bloom of womanhood. It was autumn, and mists rose in gauzy plumes over the river and its banks.

I rose also. A swirl of mist. I left my bed, I stepped onto the moss. She waited for me there, a noble and fearless creature who lived up to her name: “Alphonsine,” I whispered the ancient Gothic syllables. “Alphonsine Rose.” I enveloped her and she folded into my embrace willingly. “Dance with me, my child. Come with me.”

Her body was small in the cold bed. I looked down on her from the riverbank, and I shivered. Corporeal again after so long a time, I was no longer used to having skin and flesh that were exposed to the elements, rather than part of them. I lifted my hand and turned and twisted it, clenching and unclenching my slim, nimble fingers. They were white and soft, for I had taught her to take good care of them. I wrapped a tendril of my hair around my fingers and laughed with joy.

I stroked the pearls of the rowan berry collier that lay around my neck with the tips of my fingers and I smiled. My smile was beautiful, I had made sure of that as I taught her features to mirror mine. I untied the string and pulled it off. The red rowan berries were the colour of water tinged with pale blood. I kissed them tenderly and threw them into the waters. It had been my gift to her, and it was hers to keep. The berries scattered and swirled in the waves that still bore the imprint of her form. She dissolved and melted into the embrace of my sisters, who would teach her to dance and sing with them. They would teach her to play with mortals. They would carry her all the way to the ocean, and then back to where rivers sprang from wells in the hearts of forests, in the rocks of the mountains.

She had given me her body and I had given her a new life. I had borne her to eternity. My daughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there it is - we hope you're as excited about Part 3 as we are :D. Love you!

**Author's Note:**

> Great news, Audience! The Disgustoids now have their own blog, at a very reasonable URL: [arathos.tumblr.com](arathos.tumblr.com)
> 
> Feel free to follow it for your convenience because updates and other ridiculousness will be posted to it. It will be like a continuation of our support group, but with greater functionality. <3


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